Visual Web Scraping
Learn how to visually scrape websites using VLM Run.
Visual web scraping is a powerful technique that goes beyond traditional text-based scraping by leveraging visual elements to extract meaningful information from websites. VLM Run’s visual AI capabilities make it an ideal tool for this task, offering more robust and comprehensive data extraction compared to traditional LLM-powered web scraping methods.
Visual Scraping of Real Estate Listings
Let’s explore how VLM Run can be used to visually scrape a real estate listing from websites like Zillow. This approach is particularly effective for real estate sites, where much of the valuable information is presented visually through images and layout.
Preview of the Zillow property details page.
Using the Web Generate API
VLM Run provides a /web/generate
API endpoint specifically designed for visual web scraping tasks. Here’s how you can use it:
Structured Output
The API returns structured data extracted from the visual elements of the webpage. For a Zillow property listing, this might include:
Advantages of Visual Web Scraping
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Comprehensive Data Extraction: VLM Run can interpret visual elements like floor plans, property images, and layout to extract information that might not be explicitly stated in the text.
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Robust to Layout Changes: Unlike traditional scrapers that rely on specific HTML structures, visual scraping is more resilient to website layout changes.
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Context-Aware Extraction: The model can understand the context of visual information, leading to more accurate and meaningful data extraction.
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Handling Dynamic Content: Visual scraping can capture information from dynamically loaded content or interactive elements that might be challenging for traditional scrapers.
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Image Analysis: VLM Run can describe and categorize property images, providing valuable insights not available through text-only scraping.
Ethical Considerations
When using visual web scraping, it’s crucial to:
- Respect website terms of service and robots.txt files.
- Implement rate limiting to avoid overloading servers.
- Use the data responsibly and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.
Conclusion
Visual web scraping with VLM Run offers a powerful way to extract structured data from visually rich websites like Zillow. By leveraging visual AI capabilities, you can obtain more comprehensive and accurate information compared to traditional text-based scraping methods, opening up new possibilities for real estate data analysis and applications.
Get Started with our Web -> JSON API
Head over to our Web -> JSON to start building your own web processing pipeline with VLM-1. Sign-up for access to our API here.