The Art Of Website Data Scraping And Its Advantages

For any business to be successful, Data processing is highly important. Web scraping allows companies to derive data from various sources and is a crucial approach to business success.

October 23, 2019

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Web Scraping indicates web data extraction through several ways to collect data from the web. The best way to manage the process is through APIs. Almost all popular websites like New York Times, Apple, Twitter, and Stack Overflow provide APIs to extract information systematically. But most websites do not allow data to be extracted, and hence web scraping comes into the picture.

Why do we to scrape data?

Websites that do not provide APIs, need to be scraped for fetching volatile information like prices of products on an e-commerce website, track crypto-currencies without website checks on a constant basis.

For web scraping, we need to

Search web pages for information
Inspect the information if it is relevant
Code your logic to fetch data
Store the results in a database

Without web scraping, the web would not exist as it is now. Most search engines depend on sophisticated web scrapers to pull useful content for indexing. These tools constitute the nature of search engines.

Of course, crawling software is also used for several other purposes including article extraction for websites that compile content, business listings, leads, and other data extraction types referred to as data mining. For example, web scrapers are used controversially for pulling airlines prices to publish on comparison sites of airfares.

The Power of Web Scraping Unleashed

Some people use scraping software that is powerful and impactful. Company earnings are leaked inadvertently through web scrapers. The web scrapers are not doing anything illegal if they are scouring and posting publicly available data.

The website data scraping process can be leveraged as a powerful business tool. However, typical web crawling software is quite unwieldy to maintain and are forever fraught with problems. These traditional data extraction tools have huge issues with them. Here are the common types of scrapers.

RSS scrapers

These are easiest to program and even to maintain. The problem is that several feeds scour for some samples of information from pages. This solution does not work when these sites move feeds or stop updating them entirely.

HTML parsers

These rely on pages belonging to the same format. Every time there is a website layout change, for redesign or a revamp, the scraper fails and needs to be reprogrammed.

An old-fashioned web scraper relies on consistent programming or rules and on an assumption that the web files will stay static and will not change, which is inherently risky. Failed scrapers cause inadvertent downtime and then rely on expensive maintenance.

Advantages of web scraping services

Inexpensive

Web scraping services are cost-effective. Data is derived from websites and analysed on a consistent basis and these services are efficient and budget-friendly in every way.

Easy to implement

They rely on the proper mechanism for data extraction as data is collected from the entire domain. A onetime investment leads to loads of data being collected.

Low maintenance

The maintenance cost is extremely low as the project budget could spiral out of control. Web scraping technologies usually need no maintenance for a long period of time. The job that could be done manually within a week can be finished in a matter of hours.

Accuracy

The web scraping services are swift and accurate too. Data extraction errors can lead to major mistakes. With web scraping, websites that include info on pricing data, sales prices, are accurately extracted into the local database.