An all-inclusive guide to Web Scraping for Business

We all know that web scraping helps us unlock business potential. However, most of us are not much informed on how it actually works. Moreover, web scraping comes with numerous hurdles. You can get blocked, it's tedious to get JS/JX data, it's challenging to scale it up, and maintaining it comes with pain in the neck as you get going. Well, these are countless issues that may stop you from proceeding forward. However, there's nothing to worry about.

Here we put a detailed insight on web scraping. With this guide, you can start the process of web scraping quickly. In fact, with some or none of the technical expertise, you can get going. We help you explore web scraping and help you gain a competitive edge over others.

Web Scraping: A Way Ahead To Deal With Business

Web scraping utilizes an automated process of extracting large chunks of data from websites. This is further saved on the file in your computer or can be accessed on a spreadsheet. When you get access to the web page, you may be eligible to view data; however, you may not download it.

You can manually copy and paste, but the overall process can be pretty time-consuming. Meanwhile, web scraping automates this process. You can quickly extract reliable data from web pages which can be further used for business intelligence.

You get the option to scrape vast quantities of data of different kinds. This could range from text, images, email ids, phone numbers, and more. When working on specific projects, you may need domain-specific data, i.e., financial data, real estate data, reviews, price, or competitor data.

Moreover, you can get it all in a format of your choice, such as JSON or CSV, which you may harness the way you want.

How does Web Scraping work?

There are multiple approaches to make web scraping possible. Here, Cloudifyapps will focus on the simplest and the easiest way of web scraping.

Request Response

The first step in scraping the program is to request the target website for the contents of a specific URL. Meanwhile, the scraper gets the requested information in HTML format. All the file types for textual information are displayed in HTML on the webpage.

Parsing and Extraction

HTML is a markup language with an uncomplicated structure. When Parsing, it takes the code as text and produces a system in memory that the computer can acknowledge and work with. To be more precise, HTML parsing targets HTML code and extract relevant information like

● Title of the page

● Paragraphs on the page

● Headings on the page

● Links

● Bold text and more

You require regular expressions wherein regular expressions defining a common language, and a standard expression engine automatically generates a parser for the language.

Downloading Data

The end part is where you download data. This can be in a CSV, JSON, or a database to retrieve and use manually. The user may also employ it in any other application.

With this, you can obtain detailed data from the Web. You may further store it typically into a central local database or spreadsheet for later analysis or retrieval.

High-level Techniques for Web Scraping

Here we'll basically focus on web scraping using Machine Learning.

● Machine learning and computer vision are being fully utilized to identify and scrape information from web pages. This is done explicitly by interpreting visually as humans do.

● The working principle is straightforward. A machine learning system generally assigns each of its classifications with a confidence score. This is a measure of the statistical likelihood ensuring the category is correct, considering the patterns as discerned in the training data.

● If the confidence rating is too low, the system automatically produces a web search query designed to pull up text likely to contain the data it's trying to extract.

● The system further scrapes the relevant data from one of the new texts and reconciles the results with its initial extraction. Still, if the confidence score remains too low, it jumps on to the following text extracted up by the search string and soon.

Legal Boundaries

If you scrape data from a website, it may come under the copyrighted data or be defended by some other law. Now, the problem arises, what would occur if you scrape such data? Is it legal, or would you land in trouble?

These are some of the trickiest issues where nobody seems to have a clear idea. Here are a few essential things Cloudifyapps want you to consider regarding its legality:

● Scrape public data as much as you want. However, if you trespass or perhaps encroach private data, you may be in trouble.

● If done in an abusive manner, you might be violating the CFAA. Application of data for commercial purposes may further constitute a violation.

● Scraping copyrighted data for commercial purposes would be illegal and unethical.

● Make sure you respect and follow Robots.txt. You will be on the safer side. In violation of terms, you're opening a legal action.

● In case you are provided, and if you use API, it would perfectly legalize vis-a-vis scraping.

● It is best to follow a reasonable crawl rate like a request per 10-15 seconds, and there won't be an issue.

Starting Web Scraping

As mentioned earlier, there are varieties of easy ways to start your web scraping. Here's how you can start

Code

This is a DIY option. Here you need to have to code a scraper on your own. You may use easy-to-use open-source products. It would help if you hosted a system that can enable the scraper to run round the clock. Likewise, you need to have a robust server infrastructure to cater to your requirement.

Remember, it needs to have a store and access the extracted data. The custom-made system can help you remove the data you want. However, you will require a reliable resource to do it yourself. You might need to monitor continuously, requiring changes, modifications, and updates from time to time.

Web Scraping Tools and Services

There are existing tools in the market. A little investment will let you explore how you can harness the web scraping tools/software/service available. If you come across a genuinely viable option, you may actually benefit from the power of web scraping quickly and efficiently.

However, this truly depends upon how much you can spend or whether you would like to opt for free tools, and how much data you need to scrape.

Free Web Scraping Tools

If you're a bit tied up financially or you don't want to invest in the tools at the moment, you may explore a handful of free tools. Here are a couple of free tools that you can give a try:

Scraper from Chrome Extension

This is a chrome extension for scraping simple sites. It helps you to extract data from tables and convert it into structure format. It is a simple tool with limited options for data mining. These tools also help you in online research when you need to get data into a spreadsheet quickly.

Scrapy (Web Scraping Framework) 

Scrapy is an open-source collaborative framework. It can help a user scrape the data needed to fetch from different websites. It is an application framework used for crawling websites. You may also extract structured data which can be used for a diverse range of applications, including

● Data mining

● Information processing

● Historical archival

Extracting data from Scrapy is relatively faster. This is perfectly suitable in case you plan for bulk data scraping requirements. Also, it's efficient, scalable, and flexible.

Absolute Challenges that Comes With Scraping

While scraping a website, there are some challenging aspects. The significant areas of challenges include

Data Quality

There are many ways to get data; however, what matters is how accurate and clean the data is. You may extract data; still, it may be of no use if there are errors or incomplete information. Make sure you keep these things in your mind.

● You need clean and ready-to-use data. Therefore data quality is of utmost important criterion from the business prescriptive.

● You want to use data for a certain business decision; for that, you need high-quality data consistently. Particularly when scraping the data at a scale, it is critical not to afford to get incorrect data at the end of the whole process.

● The quality will determine whether the project stands out from the rest; also, you will need to shelve it and give up the competitive edge.

● The web scraping method won't be successful unless you can work out a way to get high-quality data.

Structure Changes

Once you set a scraper, you'll face numerous challenges. The structure change is one such area that poses quite a challenge.

Websites need to update their UI and other functionalities to enhance their user perception and the overall digital experience. This means numerous structural changes on the website. This would be pretty upsetting as you need to set up a crawler that keeps its existing code element in mind.

You may need to keep updating and modifying the scraper. Remember, the slightest change on the target website can crash the scraper or perhaps provide inaccurate or incomplete data. Besides, dealing with constant changes and updating the target website can be a significant challenge when scraping the Web.

Anti-Scraping Technologies

Some websites may employ anti-scraping technologies. If you're not aware of it, you may end up being blocked. Some websites like LinkedIn, Stubhub, and Crunchbase fear aggressive scraping, which naturally tends to utilize powerful anti-scraping technologies and defeat any crawling attempts.

Some websites may use dynamic coding algorithms to prevent bot access and implement IP blocking mechanisms even if one conforms to legal practices of web scraping. It is an arduous task to avoid getting blocked. Moreover, one needs to work out a comprehensive solution when facing anti-scraping mechanisms.

Developing such a tool can work against all odds, but it can be highly time-consuming and costly.

Where Can You Apply Web Scraping?

Web scraping can be used in numerous applications.

Price Monitoring

Most eCommerce businesses use competitive scraping as a strategy. However, you need to keep track of the pricing strategy of the competitors. The data pricing helps you decide your pricing. With the help of the right type of web scraping, you can scrape the prices on an ongoing basis, keeping a close eye on the competitor's pricing strategies.

Lead Generation

Marketing is significant for businesses. With the help of web scraping, you can get a large number of data which helps you generate countless leads. Web scraping helps you extract email ids, phone numbers with surgical precision. It's lightning-quick, and you get in a fraction of time.

Aggregated News Articles Reviews

News provides detailed insight specifically for businesses. This is essential in the field of finance and insurance. But reading every newspaper and article may not be possible. Web scraping allows extracting news stories into important insights and reviewing them.

SEO Monitoring

Search engines introduce businesses to the needs and requirements of the customer. The movement of content in the SERPs has a lot to do with engaging the company. Web scraping allows you to study how content works on the internet. In fact, they drive insights and strategies. Web scraping gives the power to acknowledge the terms of SEO and provide actionable intelligence concerning SEO.

Reputation Monitoring

You must have a decent idea about how a customer feels about your brand. Web scraping tools now allow you to extract customer reviews and other inputs from the websites. In this way, brands can monitor their reputation comprehensively. Several businesses are now using web scraping to understand customer views to serve them better.

Data Journalism

Data journalism uses data to produce new stories. Infographics, graphs, researches, etc., are a few examples of how data can be woven into stories. Data mining offers credibility to the arguments and claims. Further, this enables users to understand complex topics conveniently. Web scraping is beneficial as it powers journalists to create impactful data.

Data-driven Marketing

Marketing is a game, and data plays a key role here. However, access to information can be pretty challenging for marketers. Web scraping enables them to track data and target customers. Web scraping makes the data available and helps formulate a robust marketing strategy.

Final Wrap

Now you must have understood how powerful web scraping is for your business. With the help of web scraping, you get clean, actionable web data that can power the business intelligence ensuring unlimited growth potential.

What you need to do is explore the web scraping method at the earliest. To start with, free tools are the best option.