AI Creator's Path News: Firecrawl is the best way to use web data in LLM! You can easily get structured data. #Firecrawl #Web scraping #AI tool
Video explanation
Will information gathering change dramatically in the age of AI? What is the magical tool "Firecrawl"?
Hello, I'm John, a blog writer who loves AI technology! Recently, you often see the word "AI" in the news and on the Internet. I'm sure there are many people who think, "It sounds difficult..." But don't worry! In this blog, I will explain the complexities of AI in an easy-to-understand way, just like talking to a friend.
Well, today's topic is a tool with a rather unusual name, "Firecrawl." In order for AI to become smarter, it needs a lot of information, but collecting that information from the Internet is actually quite a difficult task. However, with Firecrawl, this difficult task may become much easier! Let's take a look!
What exactly is Firecrawl?
In a nutshell, Firecrawl isA smart helper that uses AI to gather information from the internet in an easy-to-use formatIt was developed by a company called Mendable, and since its release in 2023, it has quickly become popular.
What's so great about Firecrawl?
- You can collect information from the entire website!：Normally, to gather information from a website, you have to look at each page one by one, but Firecrawl gathers information from the entire website efficiently. It's like copying all the books in a library at once.
- No need to worry about pages that change appearance!: Recently, when you move the mouse or click on a website, the appearance changes like an animation, right? That's run by a program called "JavaScript," and Firecrawl can capture that kind of page information as well.
- Can you overcome the "No bots allowed!" barrier?: Some websites have a mechanism to prevent automated access by programs (bot prevention), or a CAPTCHA (captcha) that asks you to confirm that you are not a robot. Firecrawl skillfully clears these and collects information. (Of course, it is careful not to cause any inconvenience!)
- AI will format it so that it's easy to read!：It automatically converts the collected information into a format called "Markdown" that is easy for AI to understand, or into an organized data format called "JSON." This is very helpful for AI!
Firecrawl is available in an "open source" version, where the program blueprint is publicly available, and a "cloud service" version, which can be easily used via the Internet. It is a trusted tool, used by famous companies such as Snapchat, Coinbase, and MongoDB.
Firecrawl solves your web information gathering problems!
You may be thinking, "But isn't it okay to just copy and paste information from the web?" In fact, there are some problems that arise when trying to collect large amounts of information for AI.
Problems with the traditional approach:
- The precious information is all over the place...: If you convert a web page into text, the structure of the text, such as headings and paragraphs, can be lost. This can confuse the AI, making it wonder "Which part is important?"
- It's difficult to create pages whose appearance changes frequently!：As mentioned earlier, when the page dynamically changes display using JavaScript, it is often difficult to get the information by simply copying and pasting. It requires special skills and is a bit of a hassle.
- It's hard to gather so much information!: When trying to gather information from many websites, you may end up being blocked due to excessive access, or it may be too much work... There are limitations to what can be done manually.
Here's how Firecrawl solves these problems!
- Maintain proper sentence structure!：Firecrawl saves information in Markdown format, so it can pass it to the AI while preserving text structure, such as headings and lists, making it easier for the AI to understand the content.
- Dynamic pages are great too!Even if the page uses JavaScript to change its display, Firecrawl can read the content in the same way that a human would see it in a browser.
- We can also handle large-scale information gathering!By automatically changing the IP address (which is like an address on the Internet) you access and intelligently adjusting the frequency of access, it is possible to collect a lot of information efficiently without causing any inconvenience to the website.
How does Firecrawl work? (A little peek behind the scenes)
You may be wondering, "How does Firecrawl work?" It would be difficult to explain everything, so here I'll introduce the four main functions that support Firecrawl, with each function being a different "department" to make it easier to understand.
- Information gathering control center (crawler orchestrator): A leader who plans and gives instructions on which websites and pages to collect information from. He collects information efficiently while following the website rules (written in a file called robots.txt).
- Web page display master (Playwright microservices): He is an expert in displaying complex JavaScript-based web pages correctly, as if a human were viewing them, and catching information. He uses a tool called "Playwright" to manipulate web pages.
- Information organization professionals (extraction pipeline): It is an organizer that organizes the collected raw information into Markdown or JSON format so that it can be easily used by AI. It can also read text in PDF files and recognize text in images.
- Anti-harassment sentry (rate limiting): If you access a website too quickly, you may cause trouble for the other party. This is a reliable watchdog that will appropriately adjust the frequency of your access to prevent this from happening.
This teamwork allows Firecrawl to intelligently and quickly gather vast amounts of web information!
What can Firecrawl be used for? Specific examples
The information collected by Firecrawl can be used in a variety of ways with AI. Especially when combined with popular tools such as "LangChain" and "LlamaIndex" to make AI more convenient, the possibilities are endless!
For example, it can be used like this:
- E-commerce site price survey: Collect price information from tens of thousands of product pages of rival stores every day, analyze it with AI, and use it for your own price strategy. With Firecrawl, you can automatically collect information by simply issuing a simple command such as "Collect information from this site and save it in this format."
- Collecting and analyzing research papers: A university research team uses Firecrawl to efficiently collect a huge number of research papers (including PDF files!) published on the Internet, and uses AI to lead to new discoveries.
- Automatically track breaking news: A media company constantly monitors multiple news sites, becomes aware of new articles as soon as they are published, and responds quickly.
These are just a few examples. Depending on your ideas, you can apply this to a wide range of things!
What's next for Firecrawl?
Firecrawl is expected to continue to evolve. For example, it is said that they are developing a technology called "semantic crawling" that allows the AI itself to understand the content of the web page and gather information more intelligently, and a technology that allows information to be handled more efficiently by performing some processing on the user's computer (browser). It looks like it will become even more useful, and it's exciting!
A word from John
Wow, Firecrawl is really amazing! I used to think that gathering information from the web was a tedious and difficult process, but I'm amazed that such a smart and useful tool exists. It makes me happy to think that the future where AI will make our lives even more fulfilling will be supported by technology like this!
This article is based on the following original articles and is summarized from the author's perspective:
Firecrawl: Easy web data extraction for AI
applications