USE CASE:

The documentation site: page discovery without the guesswork

Here is how page discovery for the documentation site actually gets done, what it costs each way, and where each way stops working. Mamba Labs writes Apify actors for work like this, and Page Finder Extractor is the one that reads the documentation site.

Where this starts

Page discovery for the documentation site looks like the easy case and is not. The documentation site sits at no fixed URL, because there is no convention and never was one, which shapes page discovery. Know this about the documentation site before any page discovery: 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 documentation site.

Why anyone bothers

There is no convention for where the documentation site lives, so guessing the path works often enough to look reliable and fails silently when it does not.

The method

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

Traditional Search Tools

  • A site search operator, for the documentation site. 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.

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.

Related Actors

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