A couple of people asked me about this when I mentioned I had it.
It's a windows app that is quite a swiss army knife of scraping. Most people probably use it as a blogspammer since it has auto comment spamming built in as a function, but I rarely use it for that.
I find it very useful for checking long lists of urls for pr, checking SE indexing, see if a specific link is present, etc. It also has quite a few addons which are quite useful.
If you do like to comment on blogs, but do it manually, this app is great for finding thousands of blogs/blog posts, them sorting them by pr. You can then use the apps internal browser (IE based I think) or your default browser to manually comment.
Has a built-in proxy harvester with 7 sources. You can add your own but for what I do the built in stuff has been fine. After harvesting for about 15 minutes, and multiple tests, I usually end up with 40-80 good proxies under 2 second response with no captcha. They do die throughout the day, usually left with 10-15 the next morning.
If you use it heavily, good proxies are about $25/month for 10.
Scrapes SE results and google wonderwheel.
Supports footprints for wp, movable type and blogengine. Has a training mode to find others, or just type a custom footprint "powered by myspecialapp" add keywords and go. All harvested urls goto a box, you can then get pr (by url or domain) and sort them if you want. Remove dupes, trim to root, etc.
You can use it to find places to errr, market your site. You can scrape comp backlinks and sort them.
Import/export urls, with or without pr to clipboard, txt, rss, csv, html & add to existing, split, or randomize.
Some Addons:
alive check
backlink checker
blog analyzer
nofollow check
tdnam scraper
malware filter
outbound link checker
whois scraper
sitemap scraper
google comp finder
google image grabber
fake pr checker
rapid indexer
blogengine moderated filter
bandwidth meter
alexa rank checker
port scanner
domain resolver
and chess.
Addons are free and download-able through the app itself.
App costs $57 and is super handy for me, since I'm not the guy who bangs out some code in 5 minutes to do one of these jobs. If you have a need for anything listed above, I'd recommend it. If you don't, warning, it can be quite a distracting toy. You can see it in action in various videos at youtube, but it's not much to look at.
LOL - I think there are of things we are doing in parallel :)
Scrapebox is a wonderful tool - bit of a hokey interface, but it does the job (in fact lots of jobs) REALLY well.
>App costs $57
Is it standalone? I won't use hosted stuff.
Quote from: rcjordan on November 08, 2010, 06:27:21 PM
>App costs $57
Is it standalone? I won't use hosted stuff.
Yep, but it phones home. Part of the drm, and it updates constantly. There have been back-to-back days with fixes and added functionality.
we bought it awhile ago but I am not sure what we have used it for (out of the office today, I'll try to find out tomorrow).
Does it scrape G Instant?
looks interesting, I'll be checking it out this week.
> and chess.
That's worth $57 right there!
>Does it scrape G Instant?
I don't think so, but haven't tried.
It's great as a scraper, can't vouch for the commenting stuff as I don't use it.
Some of the other features and addons are good, but IMO the software as a whole suffers from 'designed by a programmer' syndrome - I'm sure I'm not using it to it's full extent just because the interface is often poor.
Well worth the money though IMO
Excellent writeup, thanks Drastic. I'm going to check it out.
Good review. Seems to me that the price is $97 or are you not talking about scrapebox.com?
Quote from: Torben on November 11, 2010, 09:04:49 AM
Good review. Seems to me that the price is $97 or are you not talking about scrapebox.com?
http://www.scrapebox.com/bhw
Thanks. Got it and ready to play
One more question Drastic:
How CPU intensive is this? Can I run it on the same box I'm doing other work on, or is it best on its own box?
I run it inside a Virtualbox Windows installation (for non-related reasons) and it does't seem to affect my processing speed much at all... but... if you run it at a decent speed it will likely start to max out your internet connection.
I think I might try this then...on a separate windows box. I happen to have an extra laptop I can put to work.
Been playing with this tool all day. I am blown away by how useful it is. Kind of a steep learning curve, but the videos on the site are invaluable for getting started.
Yeah, I've also been playing with it.
I've been looking at lots of WP plugins that do aspects of this and they collectively would have cost about 5-10 times as much as this.
Bound to be a lot of the features I'll never use, but more than made the $57 back already in saved time.
I'm a big fan of the wonder wheel module.
I can't figure out the wonderwheel module. What is it?
And how come I paid $97 and you only paid $57? What's up with that?
I don't notice it using resources, but I have a monster desktop quad core with 6 gigs of ram.
If you use the comment slow poster it has to keep focus which basically means you can't use the pc. Slow poster improves success rates, you generally run fast poster and go back and run slow overnight on the failures.
Sorry for the delayed response, I've been sick for over a week.
As a side note, I've been thinking about a cheap winders vps and turning this thing loose for a while.
Quote from: grnidone on November 18, 2010, 03:11:22 PM
I can't figure out the wonderwheel module. What is it?
And how come I paid $97 and you only paid $57? What's up with that?
Wonderwheel takes your main word and then grabs all the suggested terms from there. What Scrapebox does is it takes those words and then does the same exercise.
If you are looking to create a silo structure and automate content creation it's a pretty useful exercise to be able to automate.
So as an example if you type the word christmas into the google you get the following as your first tier (think categories) :
christmas decor
christmas games
christmas gifts
christmas ornaments
christmas pictures
christmas songs
christmas store
origin of christmas
Level 2 you get 66 unique keywords (think articles) :
christian christmas songs
christmas carols
christmas clipart
christmas crafts
christmas decor
christmas decor ideas
christmas decorations
christmas game ideas
christmas games
christmas gift ideas
christmas gifts
christmas lights
christmas music
christmas ornaments
christmas ornaments clearance
christmas ornaments crafts
christmas ornaments wholesale
christmas party games
christmas photos
christmas pictures
christmas shopping
christmas songs
christmas songs download
christmas songs list
christmas songs lyrics
christmas stockings
christmas store
christmas store windows
christmas tree pictures
christmas trees
classic christmas songs
commercial christmas decor
dress up christmas games
family christmas games
father christmas pictures
german christmas store
glass christmas ornaments
great christmas gifts
hallmark christmas ornaments
halloween pictures
handmade christmas ornaments
history of christmas
homemade christmas gifts
nightmare before christmas store
old christmas pictures
origin of birthdays
origin of christmas
origin of christmas symbols
origin of christmas traditions
origin of christmas tree
origin of easter
origin of halloween
outdoor christmas decor
personalized christmas ornaments
personalized gifts
popular christmas songs
primary christmas games
printable christmas games
santa games
thanksgiving pictures
top christmas gifts
true origin of christmas
unique christmas gifts
vintage christmas ornaments
wholesale christmas decor
winter pictures
Level 3 (think medium tale) you get 454 unique keywords
I won't bore you with the list, but you can go 5 levels deep so super long tail at that level but all suggestions based on the wonder wheel, but you are into thousands of words from pretty much any derivative.
There were some other plugins that I had seen that did what Scrapebox does with Wonder Wheel and they were $97 just for that, so $57 for the rest of the stuff, including chess is a bargain, saved me hours of time, and that is why I've used some of that time here.
Mary had a little lamb and it was always grunting......
Was about to knock up script but decided to give scrapebox a whirl - nice tool! 8)
Cheers