Any industry, business, or activity cannot forgo data. Producing a new product, starting a new business, reporting an event, or any endeavor needs data. Data scraping or web scraping gives you an edge against your competition.
Scrape web is the automated collection of any kind of data for analysis from a website intended for manufacturing, data science, marketing, financial research, etc. – the possibilities are infinite, depending on your creativity and objective.
If you’re data-driven, read on to scour for more information on what is web scraping and how to use the collected data.
What is Web Scraping?
Definition
Web scraping (or data scraping) is the extraction of unstructured data from a website to a structured format like a spreadsheet or an API. Data can be obtained manually, but this method can be more expensive, slower, and tedious on websites with more pages.
Scraping Websites
Here are the basic steps to obtain data from a website using web scraper.
- 1. Load the webpage.
- 2. Analyze the webpage’s HTML code by inputting some code. Collect the data.
- 3. Save the collected data in a file, like CSV format or database.
Types of Web Scrapers
Web scrapers are classified depending on the amount of data you need and how they work. Here are their types:
Plugins/Add-ons
If you’re looking into web scraped easily organizing and analyzing your data after, plugins or add-ons work best as it allows you to do multiple tasks with just one tool. A powerful Google Sheet add-on, such as Sheets Genie, is an example. This Google Sheets add-on scrapes website data directly to Google Sheets, and you can then sort and organize the data you need with just one click.
Software
A software web scraping tool is an installable scraping tool for your PC, usually compatible with Windows. To scrape small to medium amounts of data, you only need to configure the software’s settings to your preference. Save the scraped data in CSV and other downloadable formats.
Cloud-Based
You need a cloud-based web scraper tool for a large amount of data. You are good to go by presetting your data scraping requirements because this type of tool runs in multiple computing environments. You do not need to install software with a cloud-based web scraping tool. You can obtain data through the API (application programming interface) or any downloadable format.
Legal Guidelines of Web Scraping
Scraper web is legal as long as the data collected is publicly available with the following conditions.
- The user made the data public.
- Access to the data does not need a login or account creation.
- Web scrapers are not blocked by the website’s robots.txt.
Scrape web is illegal when the scraped data is private.
One responsible move is to avoid overloading the websites you are scraping through with uninterrupted multiple requests. One responsible move is to avoid overloading the websites you are scraping through with uninterrupted multiple requests. This approach will help you conduct web scraping without getting blocked. Ensure an interval with each request to prevent your IP address from being banned.
How to Use the Collected Data from Web Scraping
As mentioned, it has infinite applications. Here are some of them.
- Competitor Monitoring and Analysis: Web scraping gives you the edge and keeps you abreast of product, pricing, and marketing strategies of competitors.
- Education: Teaching and learning requires a lot of data from academia. Teachers and students can arrive at the correct insight from the extracted and processed data through data scraping.
- Financial Statements: Companies can analyze and make sound investment decisions from the financial statements from different sites and periods from the scraped data.
- Industry Insights: With scrapped industry-specific statistics and analysis, companies can sell to the appropriate companies.
- Lead Generation: Find new leads from company and business directories.
- Machine Learning Models: The source of the best data for machine learning is the web. Through scraping, machines learn and perform complex tasks from the quality data collected.
- Market Research: Understand your target market by analyzing your collected data through web scraping.
- News Monitoring: It benefits individuals or companies that are always on the news and depend on it for daily operations.
- Real Estate Listing: It provides real estate agencies with the available properties for rent or sale so they can immediately act as agents to clients who access their website.
- Risk Management: Companies can efficiently background check from different sources, like corporate registers or legal databases, new employees, clients, or customers to mitigate risks.
- Sentiment Analysis: Scrapped data from consumers through social media accounts guide businesses to providing customer-centric products to lead the competition.
- Shopping Sites Comparison: Shoppers can efficiently compare prices of the same product from different sellers.
Scrape with Courtesy
Web scraping benefits everyone with the right knowledge, tools, processes, and circumstances, so scrape the web with courtesy!
