Kimono Labs Acquired, The Future of Web Scraping
On Monday, we and the rest of the web scraping world learned that Kimono Labs had been acquired by Palantir. While our team was excited to see a win for the Kimono team, we were a bit saddened to see such a well-designed tool get shutdown, per the terms of the acquisition. While we operated in the same space and were in some sense competitors, our team had great respect for the design of the Kimono app. Even though a stand-alone desktop version will still be available, it’s unlikely to see heavy adoption due to the lack of future support.
Our Approach to Web Scraping
Kimono’s acquisition had us pause and reflect on the current state of the web scraping industry. We also thought deeply about where the industry is headed. At Datafiniti, we’ve been tackling the challenge of leveraging the web for data in two ways. One way, through our 80legs product, is focused on the here and now by helping people collect data through a traditional (albeit powerfully scalable) web scraping application. The other way, through Datafiniti, is focused on going beyond web scraping by providing complete, up-to-date, pre-compiled data sets based on web information.
A New Visual Scraper for 80legs
Very soon, we will be releasing a visual scraping tool that will let you build scrapers for 80legs by simply pointing and clicking on a web page. This tool will be very similar to Kimono Labs and other visual scrapers but will go many steps further by allowing you to build out complete crawlers that can pull data from entire website, no matter how large or deep the website is. This tool meets the intensive scraping requirements for pulling data into Datafiniti and is already being used internally to add more data to our own database. That said, despite its power, it’s also incredibly simple to use. In fact, just yesterday, we were able to use this visual tool to replicate a Kimono user’s crawl on 80legs in less than 5 minutes.
Beyond Web Scraping
We think this visual tool will open up comprehensive web scraping to a ton of people. At the same time, we’re eager to expand its use internally to help power Datafiniti. As we grow Datafiniti’s data coverage, we think there will be less reliance on DIY web scraping. After all, why build an oven when all you really want is a pizza? That ultimately is the goal of Datafiniti — to make web data so accessible that it’s as simple as ordering it off a website.
Get Access Now
We’re excited to see where this mission takes us. Expect to see our visual scraper released very soon! If you’re interested in early access, you can sign up here.
Feel free to contact us to learn more about Datafiniti as well!
