Learn what an Actor bundle is, explore existing examples, and discover how to promote them.
As pioneers in the web scraping industry, we are constantly evolving by creating new tools, incorporating new technologies, libraries, and even introducing new concepts. Apify is excited to present an innovative concept for 2024: Actor bundles.
If an Actor is an example of web automation software, then what is an Actor bundle? An Actor bundle is basically a chain of multiple Actors unified by a common use case. Bundles can include both scrapers and automation tools, and they are usually designed to achieve an overarching goal related to scraping or automation.
The concept of an Actor bundle originated from frequent customer requests for comprehensive tools. For example, someone would ask for a Twitter Scraper that also performs additional tasks, or for a way to find all profiles of the same public figure across multiple social media platforms without needing to use each platform separately.
For example, consider a bundle that scrapes company reviews from multiple platforms simultaneously, such as Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and Indeed. Typically, you would need to use several different scrapers and then consolidate the results. But this bundle would do it all in one run, once provided with the name of the company. Or consider a bundle that scrapes all posts and comments of a given profile, and then produces out a sentiment score for each scraped comment.
The main advantage of an Actor bundle is its ease of use. The user simply inputs a keyword or a URL, and the Actor triggers all the necessary Actors sequentially to achieve the desired result. The user is not expected to use each Actor separately and then process and filter the results themselves.
Keep in mind that bundles are an evolving concept and can take various forms. We are still exploring the boundaries of what constitutes an Actor bundle.
šĀ Social Media FinderĀ searches for profilesĀ on 13 social media sites provided just the (nick)name.
š Restaurant Review Aggregator getsĀ restaurant reviewsĀ from Google Maps, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Facebook in one place.
š¤Ā Social Media Sentiment Analysis Tool not only collects comments from Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok but also performsĀ sentiment analysis on them. It unites post scrapers, comments scrapers and a text analysis tool.
š¦¾Ā Website Content Crawler + Pinecone bundleĀ scrapes a website and stores the data in the Pinecone databaseĀ to build and improve your own AI Chatbot assistant.
š¤ Pinecone GPT Chatbot combines OpenAI's GPT models with Pinecone's vector database, which simplifies creating a GPT Chatbot.
As you can see, they vary in complexity and range.