What is Web Scraping? A Guide on How to Collect Data From a Website
Published: 2021-06-28 13:17:24

As we know, a huge amount of data is always a better option for the initial start. There are times when doing work, you require larger amount of data in a short period. However, the amount of data will depend on aims for fetching the data. More data will make you proud. Hence, for more precision and efficiency, you will need an ultimate solution for data collection, which you can easily expand as per the requirement.

According to the sources available on internet streams, it becomes difficult to extract relevant datasets but it is also beneficial. Also, there are inventive options that will shorten the process of data extraction by increasing the use of resources.

Among all the data scraping tools, web scraping is the easiest tool for collecting data and generating reports for business improvement or for finding basic solutions. Also, the utilization of simple scripts by Python and BeautifulSoup will make us collect most data for displaying.

In the next few parts, we will be learning the details regarding how to collect data using web scraping tools.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping means crawling the internet and collecting the web structured data, also, known as web data harvesting. The main use cases of web scraping services include price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, and market research.

Web data extraction works well for those who use a huge amount of publicly available web information for smarter outcomes.

Introduction of Web Scraping

Web Scraping works in two parts: a Web Crawler and a Web Scraper. The crawler leads the scraper, where it fetches the requested data.

The Crawler : A web crawler is also known as a “spider”, which works as Artificial Intelligence that browses the internet and searches the content using specific links. In few projects, initially, you will “crawl” the website or specific link to explore URLs which will then pass to your scrapper.

The Scraper : A web scraper is a tool designed for accurate and quick data extraction from a web page. Web scrapers vary in designs and complexity, considering the project. Data locators are a necessary part of the web scrapers and it searches the data you want to extract from HTML files. It can be XPath, CSS selectors, regex, or a mixture of them that can be used.

Web Scrapping Process

Step 1 : Our team gathers all your requirements according to the project.

Step 2 : Our web scraping experts write the scraper and set up the background to extract the data and design it according to your requirements.

Step 3 : Finally, we provide information in your required format and desired frequency.

We ensure the flexibility and scalability for your project and no matter the precision, we can easily deliver it. For instance, fashion designers ask their designers for latest trends depending on web extracted observations, investors inform regarding their stock positions, and marketing team defeats the competition with proper observations.

Advantages of Web Scraping services

• Price Intelligence

Price intelligence is a considerable use case of web scraping. Extracting pricing information and product from various e-commerce websites and then converting it to intelligence has been an important part of the latest e-commerce firms that look forward for better rates/marketing decisions depending on the data.

How are pricing intelligence and data are used?

Powerful Pricing
Revenue Enhancement
Competitor Analyzing
Product Trend Examining
Brand And MAP Compliance

• Market Research

Market research is complicated and must be accessed by the most relevant information. The information must be of high quality, high volume, and highly estimated web extracted data. The data available is of every shape and size that will rule the market analysis and business intelligence across the world.

Market Trend Examining
Market Rates
Analyzing Every Entry Point
Research And Development
Competitor Analyzing

• Real Estate

The digital transformation of real estate has disrupted traditional firms and has created havoc in the industry. By inculcating web scraped product data into a regular business, agents and brokerages can protect against top-down online competition and make informed decisions within the market.

Appraising Property Value
Observing Vacancy Rates
Estimating Rents
Understanding Market Direction

• News and Content Analysing

Present-day creates an outstanding value or a happening threat to your firm. If you are a company depending on timely news or you frequently reflect in the news, scraping news information data is the best solution for monitoring, aggregating, and filtering the best stories from your firm.

Online Public Sector Insights
Competitor Analysis
Political Campaigns
Investment Decision Monitoring
Sentiment Analysis

• Lead Generation

Lead generation is an essential marketing activity for all business firms. According to the facts of 2020 Hubspot report, 61% of leading marketers declared that generating traffic and leads was their no. 1 challenge. Fortunately, web scraping was used effectively to get access to lead lists from the website.

• Brand Analysis

In today’s competitive market, protecting your online products is your priority. Brand analysis with web scraping can provide information regarding how people react to your product and policies of selling the product.

• Business automation

In few situations, it becomes bulky to access the data. Maybe you possess some data on your website and the other part on your partner’s website which you need in a properly structured manner. Here, a data scraper works as an effective tool to simply fetch the data.

• MAP Monitoring

Minimum Advertised Plan or MAP analysis is the standard process to ensure that the brands’ online prices either matches the pricing policies. With various retailers and distributors, it becomes difficult to inspect the price manually. Here is when web scraping comes into action as you can check the prices of the product without any hassle.

How Does a Browser Receive Web Data?

To understand the working of web scrapers, it is essential to learn the working of World Wide Web. To reach the website, you need to type “makeuseof.com” in your browser or click a link from another web page where you want to visit.

Initially, your browser will take the URL that is entered, and form a “request” to send to a server. The server then processes the request and replies back.

The server’s reply will contain the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and other necessary data for allowing the web browser to form a web page for effective viewing.

Online Data Scraping Tools

If you are looking to collect qualitative data from the online world, then there are various tools listed:

Information Management Systems : Despite the typical design for managing databases, these management systems will help to extract the data, especially in-house produced by the organization.
Data Collection Software : There are various existing data collection software that make it easy to fetch the data from the internet and the users. For instance, Google forms will allow you to create forms. This will create job application forms, resulting in collection of applicant data.

Social Media Web Scraping Tools

Social media is a highlighting part of the internet. So, for complete efficiency on any topic, you will need to update yourself constantly. However, the maximum size of the on social media comes under qualitative data, and hence social media web scraping is difficult but worth. You can undergo surveys, interview people, and send questions for extracting data from people on social media.

Conclusion

Data scraping service has become an important part of every business and individuals. Various data collection tools, methods, and techniques exist, and ability is essential. Web scraping continues to be the top priority among the list of utilities and X-Byte Crawling Enterprise services.

Contact us for inquires and let us start fulfilling your requirements!!

Source: https://www.xbyte.io/what-is-web-scraping.php