Diffbot is a developer of
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
and
computer vision
Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...
algorithms and public
API
An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...
s for extracting data from web pages /
web scraping
Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for data extraction, extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. W ...
to create a
knowledge base
In computer science, a knowledge base (KB) is a set of sentences, each sentence given in a knowledge representation language, with interfaces to tell new sentences and to ask questions about what is known, where either of these interfaces migh ...
.
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.
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.
In 2019 Diffbot released their Knowledge Graph which has since grown to include over two billion entities (corporations, people, articles, products, discussions, and more), and ten trillion "facts."
The company's products allow software developers to analyze web home pages and article pages,
and extract the "important information" while ignoring elements deemed not core to the primary content.
In August 2012 the company released its Page Classifier API, which automatically categorizes web pages into specific "page types".
As part of this, Diffbot analyzed 750,000 web pages shared on the social media service
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
and revealed that photos, followed by articles and videos, are the predominant web media shared on the social network.
In September 2020 the company released a Natural Language Processing API for automatically building Knowledge Graphs from text.
The company raised $2 million in funding in May 2012 from investors including
Andy Bechtolsheim and
Sky Dayton.
Diffbot's customers include
Adobe,
AOL,
Cisco
Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, s ...
,
DuckDuckGo,
eBay
eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...
,
Instapaper,
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
, Onswipe and
Springpad.
See also
*
GPT-3
References
External links
*{{Official website
Knowledge Graph
Applied machine learning
Web scraping
Web crawlers
Web archiving
Knowledge graphs