Data insights

Welcome to our first newsletter of 2024! Let's kick the year off with some handy Crawlee and Scrapy tutorials, Apify-powered GPTs, and a fascinating use case of Google Maps Scraper.

Crawlee is rocking it ??

We launched Crawlee on Y Combinator Launch YC!

In case you're not aware, Crawlee is an open-source Node.js library for developing web scrapers and crawlers — an essential tool to acquire data for fine-tuning LLMs and RAG.

Over 11K stars on GitHub and counting ??

Get acquainted with Crawlee in this video introduction →

Crawlee data storage types ??

Want some guidance on setting up Crawlee and managing large datasets with its specialized storage types? Then you need to read this tutorial.

How to handle data in Scrapy ??????

Remember when we told you that you can run your Scrapy spiders on Apify? We wouldn't leave you without any guidance on how to integrate Scrapy projects now, would we?

That's why our Python engineer, Vlada Dusek, created a tutorial on Scrapy databases and pipelines.

Read the article here →

Scrapy alternatives ?

Not a Scrapy fan? Then you might want to check out these Python and JavaScript Scrapy alternatives. Find out how it compares with the likes of Playwright, Beautiful Soup, Cheerio, and (of course) Crawlee.

Apify-powered GPTs ??

We're proud to share the GPT that won our end of 2023 GPT competition:

SatoshiGPT!

This Apify-powered GPT is the ultimate Bitcoin expert. Ask about data, price, how to, anything Bitcoin-related.

Also, congratulations to the runner-ups:

• CarbonMarketsHQ: Has access to projects data from Verra, GS, ACR, CAR along with a corpus of documentation and market reports.

• GUNSHIGPT: Provides TikTok users data analysis and interpretation.

• InstaMagic: Data Delight: Lets you effortlessly gather Instagram posts, profiles, hashtags, and more.

Apify Adviser ??

We're also happy to share our own latest GPT: Apify Adviser.

You can use this custom GPT to find the right Actor to extract data from the web, and get help with the Apify scraping platform.

Give Apify Adviser a go →

Add knowledge to your GPTs ??

Want to learn how to enhance your own GPTs? We created a tutorial that shows you how Website Content Crawler makes it easy to scrape web content and upload the dataset to your custom GPT. Or, if you prefer video, you can check out the YouTube version instead!

Read the blog post →

Watch the video →

Finding tourist traps with Google Maps data ??

There's no shortage of fascinating uses of Apify Actors, but this one really stands out.

Find out how entrepreneur, Peter Fabor, used Google Maps Scraper for scraping ATMs to map out areas of gentrification and tourist traps.

Read the article →

Blog showcase ??

• What is cURL?

• How to build an e-commerce scraper

• How to build an email address database

Read more helpful content on the Apify blog →