In today’s digital world, data is one of the most valuable assets for any business. Websites publish a lot of structured and unstructured data that can provide useful insights if analyzed properly. However, manually collecting and extracting large amounts of data from websites is a tedious, time-consuming and expensive process. This is where web scraping services come into play.
Web scraping is the process of extracting large amounts of data from websites automatically. It involves using programs called scrapers or spiders that follow links on websites and downloads the content. These scrapers typically use bots that mimic human web browsing behavior to collect data from multiple web pages without manually copying and pasting it. The scraped data is then stored in a database or spreadsheet for easy access and analysis.
Types of web scraping
There are broadly two types of web scraping techniques:
– Basic web scraping: This involves using HTTP requests to download web pages and then using regular expressions or HTML parsing to extract the desired data elements like text, links, images etc. Basic scrapers can handle simple websites but may have issues with dynamic content.
– Advanced web scraping: Advanced scrapers use technologies like JavaScript rendering to execute client-side code and handle challenges posed by sites using AJAX, SPAs etc. They mimic a real browser to dynamically load pages, handle redirects, work around captchas and logins. Advanced scrapers are required for scraping complex modern websites with a high degree of interactivity.
Why use web scraping services?
While it is possible to build scrapers in-house, using specialized Web Scraping Services offers many advantages:
– Hassle-free implementation: Services take care of deploying and managing scrapers without requiring in-house resources or expertise. They handle all technical complexities.
– Scalability: Services can handle large scraping projects, crawling thousands of pages daily to collect petabytes of data. Their infrastructures are capable of parallel processing for faster completion.
– Round-the-clock operations: Services run scrapers continuously to stay updated with the latest website changes. They monitor scrapers and fix issues without human intervention.
– Compliance: Reputable services ensure scrapers follow robots.txt protocols and respect websites’ terms of use to avoid legal troubles. They also deploy techniques like rotating IPs to avoid detection.
– Data quality: Services analyze scraped data for errors, outliers or deviations to deliver clean validated data outputs. They provide data transformation services.
Common uses of web scraping services
With the advantages outlined above, web scraping services are being used across industries for various purposes:
Market research and competitive analysis: Services crawl competitor websites and review sites to compare products, pricing and feedback. This helps in benchmarking, identifying white spaces and improving offerings.
Content aggregation: Publishers, blogs and news portals use services to aggregate latest updates, news stories and images from other websites for curating personalized feeds, newsletters and stories on their portals.
Price comparison and monitoring: E-commerce platforms employ scrapers to track prices of products across online and offline retailers for providing most accurate price comparison to shoppers. This also helps detect any unusual price drops or hikes.
Recruitment analytics: Staffing companies and job boards scrap data of new listings, resumes, profiles and skills from major portals to build talent databases, source candidates, track hiring trends and job markets.
Public data collection: Governments and NGOs leverage scrapers to gather real-time publicly available data on tenders, public procurement, poll results, legislation updates for monitoring, research and compliance.
Challenges in web scraping
While powerful, web scraping is not without its own set of challenges:
– Dynamic content: Ajax, SPAs, cookies and session-based websites present obstacles for scrapers to retrieve dynamically loaded content.
– Bot detection: Websites actively look out for unusual scraping patterns and block scraping bots using measures like blacklisting, fingerprinting, CAPTCHAs etc.
– Scraping restrictions: Platforms have terms of use prohibiting mass automated extraction of content and impose rate limits. Scrapers need strategies to respect these restrictions.
– Legal and ethical issues: Indiscriminate scraping can lead to privacy violations, overloading of websites and even be considered cybercrime in some cases depending on jurisdiction. Due diligence is required.
– Data cleansing: Raw scraped data usually requires extensive processing to clean, normalize, validate and structure it as per requirements which adds to project timelines.
– Technical problems: Issues ranging from unstable networks, scraping fails or server downtime during long scrapes further complicate project execution.
Hence, web scraping, while an effective data sourcing method requires expertise, proper tooling and management of technical and legal aspects to extract useful, compliant data for businesses and researchers. This is where experienced scraping service providers add immense value.
Web scraping has emerged as an essential way to automate content aggregation and data extraction from websites in a cost-effective manner for various commercial and research needs across industries. With complex modern websites, the use of specialized web scraping services that also address compliance and legal issues is increasingly becoming mandatory for clean, risk-free data sourcing at scale. As online data publishing continues to grow exponentially, web scraping services will remain indispensable.
*Note:
1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it