The changelog: the work behind page discovery

What is actually going wrong

The changelog frustrate page discovery, for a reason specific to them. The changelog sits at no fixed URL, because there is no convention and never was one, and page discovery has to work around it. What catches people out on the changelog, page discovery included: guessing the path works often enough to look reliable and fails silently when it does not. Page Finder Extractor carries 1 ready made setup for page discovery on the changelog.

Traditional Search Tools

• A site search operator, for the changelog. 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.

The method

1. Start with one of the changelog you already know, so a wrong page discovery answer is obvious rather than plausible.
2. Run Page Finder Extractor across your list of the changelog, which carries 1 ready made setup for page discovery.
3. Read ten rows of page discovery on the changelog by hand before you trust the rest of the list.

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.