Web Scraping For Business
Tags: Web Scraping Tools, Crawling, Web Scraping, Web Scraping Series, Business

Web crawling vs web scraping for business — it’s a tale as old as the technologies themselves. The important thing to note is while the two are very similar technologies, they still have some key differences which define their use.

Web crawling is done by spider bots and is used by companies such as Google to index websites. On the other hand, Web scraping is done by scraper bots and is used to accumulate vital data and information from readily available or inaccessible places.

These technologies work through the use of bots, proxies, and several other things. In this article, we’ll explore web scraping and web crawling, and give you some key reasons why your business can benefit from using both of them.

Web Scraping and Why You Should Care About It

Web scraping, better known as data harvesting, is a process done by bots that extract vast amounts of data from websites. This data can be readily available on the websites or can be hidden behind firewalls and proxies.

The use of web scraping for business has been well documented, and it’s not necessarily legal for some purposes like corporate espionage. Otherwise, the use of data scraping bots for accumulating vast amounts of data is completely legal, as long as it’s not breaking any laws.

Scraping bots are at the forefront of many-a technologies, most notable of which is big data. Big data is a technology that defines huge data centers, which are vital to other technologies such as AI and machine learning, and can serve important analytical purposes.

In the past, this process was manually by human operators, and in use to take quite a lot of time. These days, the process is automatic using bots, which cuts down on costs, improves performance, and streamlines data harvesting as a whole. Companies can focus on data analysis and decision making rather than data gathering processes.

Web Crawling vs Web Scraping

Web crawling vs web scraping, the differences are far more apparent than you might think. Crawling merely crawls the web to index the content found on websites. On the other hand, Web scraping uses crawler bots to save the data found on various websites, usually in a cloud or drive storage or spreadsheet format. If you want to delve deeper into web crawling vs web scraping differences, we suggest you read more on the Oxylabs website.

Businesses Should Be Using Both

Both of them are fantastic technologies that have a lot of business applications and work best when combined. Companies can accumulate vast amounts of data for further analysis, indexing, or recovery purposes through these technologies.

To put this into perspective, companies can use these vast data storages to overcome issues they haven’t even encountered yet. It can also accumulate accurate data to cut down on data refinement costs, thus streamlining machine learning.

How They Can Help Your Business Grow

The benefits that the combination of web crawling and data harvesting have for business are irrefutable. The first thing that comes to mind is the lead generation potential of these two technologies. No longer will businesses have to struggle with overly-elaborate lead generation strategies, as web scraping promises to simplify them by a considerable margin.

Another thing that comes to mind is the UX and UI aspects. Through data harvesting and web crawling, companies can accumulate a lot of data on existing customers and prospects. This data can then in use to create a unique and adaptable UI that augments the UX massively.

Optimizing internal operations has always been a dreaded and tedious task. But through the use of data harvesting. So, companies can have a better perspective on their business based on the performance of their competition. That allows them to streamline internal processes, modify or optimize their pricing, and increase ROI while cutting down operational costs.

Lastly, the use of these two technologies in marketing and data science is good. Through web crawling and data harvesting, more efficient SEO monitoring becomes a possibility. Allowing companies to create content that appeals to their target demographic. Companies can also gather competitive information and ensure data-driven marketing, pricing, and other business strategies.

Alternatively, data analysis is also a far more efficient and cost-effective endeavor. When there is more data to study, analyze, and research.

Web Scraping for Business Conclusion

These two technologies will revolutionize the world of business in more ways than one. So, their combination promises to change the world of data as we know it. While companies such as Google have been using these technologies for a while. So, they’re just now starting to reach their full potential.

Businesses of any size can benefit from large data centers. Through these technologies, they can create these in a streamlined and cost-effective way.