Firecrawl
Firecrawl is a powerful web scraping and crawling platform that extracts structured data from websites, handles dynamic content, manages crawl jobs, and provides clean, usable data from across the web for analysis and automation.
Example Use Cases
Competitive Intelligence
Automatically crawl competitor websites to track pricing changes, product updates, and content strategy for market analysis and competitive positioning.
Content Aggregation
Scrape and aggregate content from multiple sources to create comprehensive industry news feeds, research databases, or content recommendation systems.
Lead Generation
Extract business information, contact details, and company data from directory websites and business listings to build targeted lead databases.
Price Monitoring
Monitor e-commerce sites for price changes on specific products, automatically alerting teams when prices drop below thresholds or competitors make changes.
Supported Actions
Scraping Operations
- Scrape single web pages
- Extract structured data with selectors
- Handle JavaScript-rendered content
- Extract specific elements by CSS or XPath
- Retrieve page metadata and links
- Parse HTML tables to structured data
Crawling Jobs
- Start crawl jobs for entire websites
- Define crawl depth and page limits
- Set URL patterns and filters
- Retrieve crawl job status and progress
- Cancel active crawl jobs
- Get crawl results and extracted data
Content Processing
- Clean and normalize extracted data
- Convert HTML to markdown or plain text
- Extract images and media URLs
- Parse dates and structured information
- Handle pagination automatically
Job Management
- Monitor crawl job status
- Retrieve job logs and errors
- Schedule recurring crawls
- Set job priority and rate limiting
- Export data in multiple formats
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Firecrawl handle JavaScript-heavy websites?
Firecrawl uses headless browser technology to execute JavaScript and render dynamic content, ensuring you can scrape modern single-page applications and sites that load content asynchronously.
What are the rate limits for crawling?
Firecrawl implements intelligent rate limiting to avoid overwhelming target sites and respect robots.txt directives. Durable automatically manages crawl speeds and delays based on site responses and your subscription tier.
Can I scrape sites that require authentication?
Yes. Firecrawl supports scraping authenticated pages by providing cookies, headers, or handling login flows. However, always ensure you have permission to access and scrape the target site's authenticated content.
How are crawl errors handled?
Durable implements automatic retries for transient failures, logs permanent errors with detailed information, and provides job status updates. You can retrieve error logs to troubleshoot issues with specific URLs.
What data formats can I export?
Extracted data can be returned in JSON, CSV, or structured object formats. Durable handles format conversion and provides clean, normalized data ready for analysis or integration with other systems.
Is web scraping legal?
Web scraping legality depends on the website's terms of service, copyright laws, and data protection regulations. Always review target sites' robots.txt, terms of service, and applicable laws before scraping. Durable provides the tools, but users are responsible for legal compliance.
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