Diffbot

Diffbot
Private company
Industry Internet
Headquarters Palo Alto, California, United States
Area served
 Worldwide
Key people
Services Web APIs, Enterprise Search
Website www.diffbot.com

Diffbot is a developer of machine learning and computer vision algorithms and public APIs for extracting data from web pages / web scraping. The company was founded in 2008 at Stanford University and was the first company funded by StartX (then Stanford Student Enterprises), Stanford's on-campus venture capital fund.[1]

The company has gained interest from its application of computer vision technology to web pages, wherein it visually parses a web page for important elements and returns them in a structured format.[2] In 2015 Diffbot announced it was working on its version of an automated "Knowledge Graph" by crawling the web and using its automatic web page extraction to build a large database of structured web data.[3]

The company's products allow software developers to analyze web home pages and article pages,[4] and extract the "important information" while ignoring elements deemed not core to the primary content.[5]

In August 2012 the company released its Page Classifier API, which automatically categorizes web pages into specific "page types".[6] As part of this, Diffbot analyzed 750,000 web pages shared on the social media service Twitter and revealed that photos, followed by articles and videos, are the predominant web media shared on the social network.[7]

The company raised $2 million in funding in May 2012 from investors including Andy Bechtolsheim and Sky Dayton.[8]

Diffbot's customers include Adobe, AOL, Cisco, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Instapaper, Microsoft, Onswipe and Springpad.[5][6][9]

References

  1. ↑ "Stanford's SSE Ventures Funds Diffbot". TechCrunch. October 27, 2008. Retrieved March 14, 2013.
  2. ↑ "Diffbot Lets Developers Navigate Code the Way Our Eyes See the World". TheNextWeb. August 25, 2011. Retrieved April 21, 2013.
  3. ↑ "Startup Unleashes Its Clone of Google’s 'Knowledge Graph'". Wired. June 4, 2015. Retrieved June 15, 2015.
  4. ↑ "Diffbot Helps Apps Read the Web Like Humans". GigaOm. August 25, 2011. Retrieved March 14, 2013.
  5. 1 2 "Investors Back Diffbot's Visual Learning Robot for Web Content". The Wall Street Journal. May 31, 2012. Retrieved March 14, 2013.
  6. 1 2 "DiffBot’s new API brilliantly reveals what’s hiding behind any link". August 16, 2012. Retrieved March 14, 2013.
  7. ↑ "Twitter: A Day in the Life". August 16, 2012. Retrieved March 14, 2013.
  8. ↑ "Diffbot raises $2 million to help apps understand the open, unstructured web". TheVerge. May 31, 2012. Retrieved March 14, 2013.
  9. ↑ "Diffbot Bests Google's Knowledge Graph To Feed The Need For Structured Data". Forbes. June 4, 2015. Retrieved June 15, 2015.

External links

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