Ever looked at a delicious list on a website and copied and pasted it, bit by bit, into an Excel or Google Doc? Yeah, those days are over. One thing I love to do is scrape the Web, and Google Docs makes that fairly simple with three commands (in order of complexity):
- ImportFeed
- ImportHTML
- ImportXML
ImportFeed and ImportHTML are easy sneezy, but I couldn’t wrap my non-programmer brain matter around ImportXML because all the blog posts I read on it were written by web developers.
So I made it my ambition to figure it out and then explain it in simple terms that normal people can understand with analogies to things like the Duggar family and gingers who wear funky shoes.
You can watch the video here:
View the presentation here:
And check out the Google Doc I shared that shows tons of examples here:
Hi Annie, Have you tried to import Google’s “About 5,000 results” # (just below search). Any idea how to go about doing that?
I’d use Scrapebox and some very good proxies. 🙂
Awesome! 🙂
Hi Annie,
Slide 43, bullet point 5 says you’ve used it to pull GA metrics – I’ve been trying to get some Google analytics data into a spreadsheet but the ImportXML function does not work. It says imported XML content cannot be parsed. Could you share an example of how you’ve done this.
Also, I tried accessing the google docs spreadsheet you’ve shared now requires permission.
Thanks for sharing the tips!
You can’t scrape GA metrics; you need to use the API for that. I wrote a post on how to use a free tool: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-the-google-analytics-api-in-plain-english-and-a-free-plugin-139867.
I don’t share permissions for my gdocs. You can make a copy for yourself to use.
thanks
hello annie! i would like to view the google doc but it doesn’t seem to be shared publicly? it says i need to request permission just after clicking the link to view it. thanks heaps! you are amazing. 🙂
Are you seeing it now? I lost all of my Google Docs when Google Sheets updated. But I think they’re all fixed now.
CONTINUE function doesn’t work anymore…any suggestions?
Its works.thxs anni
Great!