By curious coincidence, just a day after my post on client side scraping, I had a chance to demo this to a client. They were making a contacts database. Now, there are two big problems with managing contacts.

  1. Getting complete information
  2. Keeping it up to date

Now, people happy to fill out information about themselves in great detail. If you look at the public profiles on LinkedIn, you’ll find enough and more details about most people.

Normally, when getting contact details about someone, I search for their name on Google with a “site:linkedin.com” and look at that information.

Could this be automated?

I spent a couple of hours and came up with a primitive contacts scraper. Click on the link, type in a name, and you should get the LinkedIn profile for that person. (Caveat: It’s very primitive. It works only for specific URL public profiles. Try ‘Peter Peverelli’ as an example.)

It uses two technologies. Google AJAX Search API and YQL. The search() function searches for a phrase…

google.load("search", "1");
google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {
  gs = new google.search.WebSearch();
  $("#getinfo").show();
});

function search(phrase, fn) {
  gs.setSearchCompleteCallback(gs, function() {
    fn(this.results);
  });
  gs.execute(phrase);
}

… and the linkedin() function takes a LinkedIn URL and extracts the relevant information from it, using XPath.

function scrape(url, xpath, fn) {
  $.getJSON("http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?callback=?", {
    q: "select * from html where(url=\""
      + url + "\" and xpath=\"" + xpath + "\")",
    format: "json",
  }, fn);
}

function linkedin(url, fn) {
  scrape(url, "//li[@class][h3]", fn);
}

So if you wanted to find Peter Peverelli, it searches on Google for “Peter Peverelli site:linkedin.com” and picks the first result.

From this result, it displays all the <LI> tags which have a class and a <H3> element inside them (that’s what the //li[@class][h3] XPath does).

The real value of this is in bulk usage. When there’s a big list of contacts, you don’t need to scan each of them for updates. They can be automatically updated — even if all you know is the person’s name, and perhaps where they worked at some point in time.