Today's business people spend between one and five hours of their business day looking for and capturing online information for the purposes of their firms and companies, according to a recent survey conducted upon the request of Ficstar Software, one of the leading developers of web data extraction and collection tools.

While a firm's online presence may vary, today's business environment makes it necessary to be constantly aware of what is going on in a given sector, or how target audience changes as new products and services are developed. While some firms still resort to more traditional media for data collection, the Internet is now the undoubted leader in this area.

Given the amount of information that we need to perform our day-to-day activities, and the amount of time we need to do that, the recent appearance of website grabber tools is undoubtedly an efficient solution that saves businesses a lot of the time and resources necessary for manual web data extraction.

Another feature that the survey found makes website grabbers preferred to manual extraction is reliability. Reliability here refers to both the solution itself (it can never get late for work or lose motivation for work), and the quality of web data extraction - when using an automated website grabber, your risk of mistakes is kept down to a minimum.

Given the growing need of website grabbers and the many advantages they offer, players on this market have realized the need of expansion, differentiation, and diversification. For instance, Ficstar Software offers several versions of its key product, the Ficstar Web Grabber, each of which focuses on a different type of web data collection needs.

To name one of these, the Ficstar Contacts Grabber is intended for businesses for which the collection of accurate, complete up-to-date information from the Internet is the key to successfully building membership or informational sites, or executing sales and marketing activities. The Contacts Grabber is a powerful, intuitive tool that allows the quick and easy collection of results from online business directories, member listings, and other web pages that contain contact information.

When compared to manual data collection, Ficstar's products cost just a fraction of the expenses required for wages; moreover, a website grabber is an investment which pays back extremely quickly, and its use results in enhanced customer satisfaction and more reliable and cost-effective business operation.