Common Methods Used in Web Scraping

Web scraping is the process of harvesting data from different sources found in the web. The data scraped should be from a proven website only. The data harvested can be used for many uses depending on the industry on question. When outsourcing web scraping services it is important to hire a professional data mining company that offers quality services. The company should also have the required expertise and some kind of knowledge such as image scrapping, web data extraction, data mining, email extract services and web grabbing.

<b>Who can use Data Scraping Services?</b>

Data extraction and scraping services may be employed in any organization, firm or company that needs data in a given industry. It is possible to get a lot of information from the internet and the information can be used as the basis of making decisions. For instance, a marketing company may use the web scraping process to undertake the marketing of a given product and therefore reach the customers on target.

Network marketing companies may also employ the data extraction and web scraping services to find new customers through the process of extracting given data relating to the customer. It is possible to get the customer contacts and therefore be able to contact the customer through sending a postcard, telephone, email. In this way, a company is likely to build their huge network and build their own brand and company.

<b>Web Data Extraction</b>

It is important to note that the web pages are built by the use of text based mark-up languages such as XHTML and HTML. They also contain many data in form of text form that makes it quite useful. It is quite unfortunate to note that most of the websites have been designed for the human-end use and therefore pose problems when it comes for automation use. For the above reasons, tool kits that can be used to harvest the web content have been developed. For instance, a web scraper is just an API that is used to extract data from different websites. Companies can build their own API that can help them to scrape data from thousands of pages easily. There is a need to use applications that are affordable and high quality.

<b>Data Collection</b>

Generally, data transfer among different applications is accomplished by the use of info structures that can be easily being designed for automated processing by computers and not individual people. The interchange formats commonly used are typically rigid, documented and well structured. They can be easily be packed, parsed and have minimum ambiguity. The main difference of web scraping from the normal parsing is the output. In web scraping the output is meant for display to the end user.

<b>Email Extraction</b>

Data mining companies have developed tools that can help one to harvest emails only from reliable sources. The main function of this process is to collect business contacts from different websites, text files, HTML files and any other format. With this service, the possibility of collecting duplicate emails is eliminated.

<b>Screen scrapping</b>
![abstract.jpg](https://qiita-image-store.s3.amazonaws.com/0/60094/bd7a94a9-69a7-6e03-57cb-20a70097c42e.jpeg)

Screen scraping can be defined as the technique of reading the text information from a web page and then collecting the visual data from its source, rather than parsing the data as it is the case in web scraping.