
Show HN: Web Scraping in Google Sheets - linkfish
https://link.fish/google-sheet-add-on/
======
briandoll
Love seeing Google Spreadsheets used like this. Many MVP 'products' would do
well to be a 'simple' spreadsheet first.

sheetsee.js is great for visualizing data in these spreadsheets too (can make
a graph on a website from data in a google spreadsheet in a few lines)
[https://github.com/jlord/sheetsee.js](https://github.com/jlord/sheetsee.js)

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TremendousJudge
And Google Sheets would do well to improve the add-on development experience.
It's absolutely awful and the documentation rarely tells you what you actually
need to know

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janober
Totally agree! Did run into a lot of problems developing the Add-On. For some
issues, even bug reports exist that are many years old. So for me, it sadly
kind of seems like Google totally lost interest.

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TremendousJudge
You developed this addon? Lots of respect, my development experiences were
really discouraging, and I was very happy when I didn't have to do it anymore.
I can't begin to imagine what it must have taken to develop something so
complex

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janober
To be honest, was not that complex. The problem was just that Google Script
made stuff that I expected to take 5 minutes to code take days in the end. For
example, simply refreshing the value of a cell. I thought I simply gonna call
some kind of method and it will take care of it. Sadly was quite the opposite.
Took me a week to figure out that to achive that, I have to: 1\. save the
formula of the cell 2\. remove the formula from cell 3\. set the focus to
another cell 4\. set the formula in the cells back to their former value 5\.
activate the cells again And in the end, they then have such additional
gimmicks like that they use different value separators in the formulas
depending on your country (some use comma others semicolons).

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chenster
80/20 rules sadly.

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jacobwal
Cool product, excited to try it out!

Apologies in advance for unsolicited feedback, but I think you could benefit a
lot on the revenue side if you played around with pricing. I've done a lot of
scraping stuff in the financial services world, and this would definitely be
worth more than $199 per month for them if it can help them get an information
edge.

Patio11 writes some great stuff about pricing here
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-
revenue/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/)

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janober
Thanks a lot! Great to hear!

Actually asked bellow specifically for feedback, so exactly what I wanted to
hear. Agree, the pricing is probably really something that still has to get
improved. This is currently the first iteration in which I did mainly orient
on competitors and my costs. Hope once I have some more users and get more
feedback I can improve on that. Also thanks for the link! Gonna read that
later.

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josephjrobison
Please keep the pricing as is for now, I like it :)

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foxylad
Do yourself a big favour, and make your credit numbers locale-aware. Many
(most? not sure) people are going to assume (like I did) that $9.99 would get
me 10 credits, because "." is a decimal point in my locale.

I almost closed the page at that stage because $1 per page scraped seemed very
greedy, and it wasn't until I saw the Expert plan with it's "1 million" that I
realised that 10.000 = ten thousand.

Maybe use the SI convention of spaces: 10 000.

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janober
Thanks a lot for the tip. Will change that immediately.

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totally
In case you're not aware, MS Excel already does this.

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/connect-to-a-web-
pa...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/connect-to-a-web-page-power-
query-b2725d67-c9e8-43e6-a590-c0a175bd64d8)

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janober
Thanks, was actually not aware of that. Did honestly not use MS Excel for
probably 10 years. Looks very interesting, gonna check out the documentation.

Looks like that now with my Add-On Google Sheets can finally do the same what
MS Excel apparently could since 2007.

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janober
Launched today our Sheets Add-On and would love to get feedback. Also if there
are any questions, I am here to answer them.

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soared
Ever since kimono labs shut down I haven't found a good point and click
replacement - this looks like it might fit my needs of scraping <10 pages for
something simple like blog titles + URLs.

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janober
Most pages should work by default because more and more start to use
Schema.org to markup their pages. In case a website is not supported or the
needed data is missing it is possible to add support. The easiest by simply
writing us and we add it ourself. The alternative is to use our point and
click data-selector tool which is similar to how kimonolabs worked. It can be
accessed by logging into link.fish and then select in the header menu "Plugins
>> Data Selector".

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JanKoenig
I think this is an opportunity for people who want to quickly build early
versions of a product or website without diving deeply into the code. I've
used Google Spreadsheets for some of my Alexa Skills and I think it's a super
lightweight CMS. This integration could be helpful for adding dynamic content.
Thumbs up

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philfrasty
for low-volume requests Airtable is also pretty nice to use in an Excel-like
fashion with a dedicated API (free for a couple of thousand of entries).

edit: except missing the scraper part haha

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janober
Actually wrote this morning Airtable to maybe also create a scraping extension
for them. Still waiting for an answer.

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redindian75
GoogleSheet natively can import webpages using '=ImportXML("website.com")'.
But it is not as elegant as this addon

an example: [https://zapier.com/blog/google-sheets-importxml-
guide/](https://zapier.com/blog/google-sheets-importxml-guide/)

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ajainy
Great job. You might need to work on pricing. (I am sure, you are still
experimenting). I used google sheets before to get rest APIs and extract
information. (internal project). But google sheets being on cloud, provides
many opportunities for integration. Google should be more serious on plugin
marketplace.

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miguelbemartin
Really interesting tool. Searching for that time ago. Can't wait to try it
out.

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janober
Great to hear! Would love to get some feedback from you once you did. Thanks!

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miguelbemartin
Sure! I will do it.

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jakefr
Interesting. I'm trying it out but getting "You are not allowed to get a
DomainDescriptions you did not create!" after creating a custom Data Selector.

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janober
Yes saw that in the logs and actually already wrote you an email. At the
current point in time, we do not allow to change DomainDescriptions other
people created. In this case, we save the one the user wanted to save and log
it (that the work is not lost) and then incorporate the changes our self. This
will change in the future. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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joshsabol46
FYI, the email signup button on the Home page reads: "Keep me updat"

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janober
Thanks for the info! However, I just checked and for me, it displays it
correctly. Can you please tell me what browser and version you are using that
I can debug it. Thanks!

