Since I am always looking for new handy tools, I found a cool way scraping data from websites: “Magic” from import.io Ltd.

Import.io website

One-click data extraction

This service provides a simple one-click data extraction from websites to CSV. Also, you can generate a link (and API) under which the data updates automatically if the website has updated. You can then use the data e.g. in Google Docs or in your own website.

Data from Google finance: Hard to use in your analyses.

Data scraped from google and reformated to a structured format which allows copy & paste to e.g. MS Excel.

If Magic does not deliver, what you expected to get – which rarely happened to me – import.io provides other tools, which allow for better configuration. And the best of all is that it is all free.

Aggregation of data distributed over many pages

import.io goes even further than just converting a single webpage. They also provide a crawler, which detects the content you define on the whole website and aggregates the data into a single table.

Import.io is an interesting start-up company

Import.io was founded in 2012 and released its first beta end 2013. An interesting question is how import.io will survive if they are giving their tools away “free for life”. But, I guess that with 4.3 mio GBP funding, they got sufficient funds for the next few years… 😉