Get The Specific Data You Want From The Data Scraping Best Practices

There are some fundamental principles, which can be followed while doing data scraping best practices. These principles are derived from the experience in data scraping market and it will be helpful to you to deal with different difficulties and mistakes.

August 2, 2019

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Break the Data into Pieces

Usually, we rate the web as an unreliable environment where the connection can be lost any time. So, it’s good to break the data into pieces to get separated loaded. If a few data pieces can’t be extracted due to the websites or connection problem, then the other pieces won’t be influenced so you can carefully save them to get further process. This technique is particularly useful while loading of huge data, leaving the computer to work for many hours or even many days. Also, it’s a very good idea of saving each data portion to disk when you get it and make many attempt for loading a particular data if failure takes place.

First Retrieve Completely and then Process

When doing web data scraping best practices or scraping any new website, it’s good to have the complete data and save to the disk, rather than try to process it. It may save your time as well as save you from getting banned. For instance, if you want to scrape 500 pages, which have some prearranged information, extract them and save it in the database. In case, you scrape the page, process it and then go to the subsequent one, you might find the 400th page with different structure, which breaks the mining algorithm and you have to adjust accordingly and initiate scraping again, which may cost you a considerable time amount.

Be Very Specific in your Search

It’s better to be very specific, strict, and narrow in your website data scraping best practices. For instance, if you are expecting a value that you find from the scraped pages to be the number, verify that it’s actually a number! It may look to be very narrow; however, it makes sure that you don’t get any unexpected page structure. It is advisable to perform a semantic checking of all the text values in case it’s possible. This can significantly increase the output data quality, particularly if you are scraping a huge data, then it’s not easy to manually check and it’s not merely the typo problem. The reality is that the information that you have isn’t the expected one and this may indicate that you have the page of diverse formats and your algorithm should be adjusted.

Collecting Statistics Will Be Helpful

While scraping megabytes or gigabytes of data, statistics can be very helpful for you. It’s always suggested to set some metrics as well as evaluate the output quality. For instance, while doing data scraping best practices, you may verify how many females and males you have got. In case the ratio looks strange, you can verify your algorithm. In case, among the thousand values that you have got, only one is not unfilled, then you should test out your parser. Maybe the other values are particular in other places on the different pages.