USE CASE:
The about page: the honest take on page discovery
Everything below is about one job: page discovery for the about page, done in a way that survives a list rather than a single lookup. Mamba Labs builds Apify actors, and Page Finder Extractor is the one named below that covers the about page.
The situation
Page discovery for the about page the shortcuts stop working, for one specific reason. The about page sits at no fixed URL, because there is no convention and never was one, and page discovery inherits that. Worth knowing about the about page, since page discovery inherits it: guessing the path works often enough to look reliable and fails silently when it does not. We keep 1 preconfigured task for page discovery on the about page, across 1 tool.
Traditional Search Tools
- A site search operator, for the about page. Free, precise, and rate limited into uselessness past twenty companies.
- Google with a site operator. Free and precise. Fine for twenty companies, and rate limited into uselessness past that.
- Screaming Frog. Crawls a whole site and finds every page matching a pattern. Built for one site at a time rather than a list of hundreds.
- Guessing the URL. Try slash pricing. It works surprisingly often and fails silently, which is the problem.
- Search the site. A site search in Google with the term you want gets you there in one query per company. Reliable, and it is still one query per company.
Preconfigured tasks
A task is one of these actors with the inputs already filled in for a specific version of this job. Open one, swap in your own list, and run it without setting anything up from scratch.
Mamba Labs Apify Actors
These are the actors we built for this job. If yours is not covered here, search from the bar at the top of the page or contact us here and tell us what you need.
- Page Finder Extractor1 preconfigured task on this page's job.