Web Scraping for LLMs in 2024

The video by LLMs for Devs explores various tools for web scraping in 2024, focusing on Jina AI’s Reader API, Mendable’s Firecrawl, and Scrapegraph-ai. The presenter introduces the tools and demonstrates their use in scraping competitor pricing pages for market research. Jina AI’s Reader API simplifies the process by adding ‘read.jina.ai’ before any URL to get clean data. Mendable’s Firecrawl, initially a documentation chatbot, now offers web scraping capabilities using LLMs and requires an API key. Scrapegraph-ai is an open-source project that creates pipelines for web scraping using LLMs. The presenter compares the tools by scraping content from selected websites and analyzing the token costs using TikToken, a library from OpenAI. Results show that Jina AI provides the cleanest, most human-readable data, while Firecrawl offers markdown format, and Beautiful Soup retrieves raw HTML. The video also demonstrates extracting specific data, such as pricing tiers, using OpenAI’s GPT-4o. The presenter highlights the cost-efficiency of using these tools compared to traditional methods and concludes with a brief overview of Scrapegraph-ai’s capabilities.