Scrapebox

[Drastic]

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.

[4Eyes]

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.

[rcjordan]

>App costs $57

Is it standalone? I won't use hosted stuff.

[Drastic]

>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.

[JamesR]

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?

[jangro]

looks interesting, I'll be checking it out this week.

> and chess.

That's worth $57 right there!

[Drastic]

>Does it scrape G Instant?

I don't think so, but haven't tried.

[sugarkane]

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

[Travoli]

Excellent writeup, thanks Drastic.  I'm going to check it out.

[Torben]

Good review. Seems to me that the price is $97 or are you not talking about scrapebox.com?

[Drastic]

Good review. Seems to me that the price is $97 or are you not talking about scrapebox.com?

http://www.scrapebox.com/bhw

[Torben]

Thanks. Got it and ready to play

[grnidone]

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?

[4Eyes]

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.

[grnidone]

I think I might try this then...on a separate windows box.  I happen to have an extra laptop I can put to work.