Horseman

Horseman is a powerful and versatile desktop web crawling application designed for a wide range of professionals, including frontend developers, performance analysts, digital agencies, accessibility experts, and SEO specialists. It operates as your 'endlessly configurable crawling companion,' allowing you to crawl the web precisely the way you want. Available for Windows, macOS (Intel and M1/M2), and Linux, Horseman empowers users to gain expert insights across their entire website through a unique, snippet-powered system.

The core of Horseman's functionality lies in 'snippets'—small pieces of JavaScript code that interact with a website to return specific information. Anything you can do in Chrome's DevTools console, you can automate across thousands of pages with Horseman. This makes it an incredibly flexible tool for custom data extraction and analysis.

A standout feature is its deep integration with AI. Horseman incorporates GPT-3.5, allowing you to send page content, metadata, or any extracted data to the AI for analysis, summarization, or transformation. For those who are not proficient in JavaScript, Horseman offers an AI helper that can write the necessary snippets for you based on a simple description of the data you want to extract. This significantly lowers the barrier to entry for complex web crawling tasks.

How to use Horseman

Using Horseman is a straightforward process designed for efficiency. First, download and install the application on your supported operating system (Windows, macOS, or Linux). To begin a crawl, you simply enter a starting URL. The next step is to select the data you want to collect by choosing from over 120 built-in snippets or creating your own. If you don't know JavaScript, you can use the AI Snippet Helper: describe what you need (e.g., 'extract all H1 headings and their sentiment'), and the AI will generate the code. You can also directly use the GPT integration to perform tasks like summarizing content for meta descriptions. Once your snippets are configured, you run the crawl. Horseman will navigate the site and execute your snippets on each page. The results are presented in a clear, sortable table. For deeper analysis, the 'Insights' feature helps you drill down into specific issues and the pages they affect.

Core Features of Horseman

• AI-Powered Snippet Creation: Generate custom JavaScript snippets by describing your data needs in plain English, making the tool accessible to non-developers.
• GPT-3.5 Integration: Send entire pages or specific data points to GPT for advanced analysis, content summarization, sentiment analysis, and more.
• Extensive Snippet Library: Comes with over 120 pre-built snippets for common tasks related to SEO, performance, content, and accessibility.
• Fully Configurable Crawling: Use custom JavaScript to extract virtually any piece of information from a webpage, just like using the DevTools console.
• Deep Insights Feature: An analytics tool that aggregates crawl data to highlight site-wide issues and allows you to explore the specific pages affected.
• Cross-Platform Availability: A native application that runs on Windows, macOS (Intel & Apple Silicon), and Linux.
• Developer-Focused: Perfect for technical users who want to automate complex checks and data extraction tasks across entire websites.

Use Cases for Horseman

Horseman is a versatile tool applicable to many scenarios:

• Technical SEO Audits: Check for H1 sentiment, find pages with missing meta descriptions, audit schema markup, and analyze internal linking structures.
• Web Performance Analysis: Detect when the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) image is loaded with a low priority, identify elements causing page overflow, and find render-blocking resources.
• Content Strategy and Auditing: Use Mozilla's readability.js for intelligent content extraction or leverage GPT to summarize articles and generate new, relevant meta descriptions at scale.
• Web Scraping and Data Extraction: Create custom scrapers to gather product information, pricing data, contact details, or any other structured data from websites.
• Accessibility Testing: Automate checks for common accessibility issues, such as missing alt text or incorrect ARIA roles, across an entire site.

Advantages of Horseman

Horseman stands out due to its unparalleled flexibility. While other crawlers offer a fixed set of checks, Horseman's snippet-based architecture means you are only limited by your imagination (and your JavaScript skills, which are augmented by AI). The integration of GPT-3.5 is a game-changer, turning a simple crawler into an intelligent analysis tool. It empowers users to not just collect data, but to interpret and act on it directly within the application. This makes it a 'skeleton key' for any technical toolbox, combining the power of a custom script with the ease of use of a GUI application.

Pricing and Plans

Horseman uses GitHub Sponsors for its payment gateway, offering early-bird pricing through a subscription model.

• Sponsor Plan: $5 per month. Includes a 1-device limit and bonus extras like a GitHub sponsor badge.
• Sponsor++ Plan (Most Popular): $10 per month. Includes a 3-device limit and all the bonus extras.
• Sponsor+++ Plan: Custom device limit. Users are encouraged to contact the developer for a custom plan tailored to their needs.

This sponsorship model allows users to support the ongoing development of the project while getting access to a powerful tool.