I’m making an AI powered scraper
FetchFox can scrape any site for any data
I’m making FetchFox, a Chrome extension designed to scrape any data from any website—no coding required.
If you don’t know what a scraper is, it’s pretty simple. A scraper visits a website like www.AmericanAirlines.com, and extracts useful data like flights dates and prices. If you’ve ever used an app like Google Flights, you’ve seen data from a scraper.
Until now, writing a scraper required advanced coding skills. You had to know things like how to use CSS/XPath, how to orchestrate concurrent requests and how to mask your IP address.
FetchFox changes that. It’s a scraping tool accessible to anyone.
What is web scraping?
Before we get into FetchFox, let's talk a little more about traditional scrapers. Suppose you want to get prices for all the dressers on Amazon. You can visit the pages one-by-one and copy the price yourself, but it’s tedious and boring to do this for hundreds of pages.
A scraper is a bot that does it for you. It crawls the pages on Amazon and pulls out just the bits of data you’re interested in. The end result is a spreadsheet that’s quick and easy to analyze.
However, traditional scraping requires coding. A developer looks at the code of the target website, and figures out how to extract data. For example, the developer may notice that Amazon always lists the product price after its star rating. He’ll use this pattern to write a scraper that finds pricing on Amazon.
But not everyone is a developer. If you can’t code, you can’t write a scraper. Even if you are a coder, doing it the traditional way can take hours. And finally, many big sites intentionally make it hard to scrape their pages.
How does FetchFox work?
FetchFox uses AI to make scraping 10x better. It lets anyone write a scraper in minutes instead of hours, with zero coding. And because it views the web like a human, it can’t be blocked like a scraper written with code.
Let’s use the Amazon scrape as an example: you want to pull pricing data for dressers on Amazon.
There are three steps with FetchFox:
Navigate to the page you want to scrape: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dressers.
Tell FetchFox you want to find dressers, and get their prices
Click scrape!
And that’s it. This scraper would have taken over an hour and advanced coding skills before, but with AI it took just a couple minutes. You can see an example of the data it pulls out in this Google sheet.
Go ahead and try the extension on some sites you’re interested in.