Why is information important in the business sector? What are the advantages of data extraction from a particular website? Actually, there are many benefits suchas pricing comparison, revenue optimization, competitor monitoring, investment decision making and so on. There are a lot of use cases where web scraping can be practical, critical and insightful.
Many companies are offering such a service and MyDataProvider is the one standing out. It has many great and practical scraping solutions. As you may know, scraping can be done manually or via automated services. MyDataProvide will help with the following spheres:
- – Monitoring prices of the competitors
- – Offering alternative data for finance
- – Doing market research
- – Real estate and related spheres
- – Analysis of market sentiment and trends
- – Content monitoring along with news
So, it’s clear that web scraping is broad and practical at the same time. In this article, you will learn more about web scraping.
What Is Web Scraping?
Simply put, web scraping a.k.a. harvesting or data extraction, is the action of gathering and extracting information from websites using several methods. Generally, it’s a good idea to use software to perform such a gathering of data. Why is software-based web scraping more efficient?
Almost all sites are prone to scraping and information can be taken from them with or without consent. Yet, since there is a massive flow of information, doing it manually won’t be reliable or complete as it will take a lot of time. It won’t be accurate, as you may skip something essential or retrieve irrelevant content. Thus, the software will help you do everything clearly, fast, and efficiently. The more sophisticated the software , the more accurate and targeted the information is.
Image credits: oxylabs.io
Of course, the concept of gathering data via scraping has brought about many ethical questions and dilemmas. Much has been debated over whether it’s legal to extract data from the sites. The recent case where LinkedIn has been involved has made it clear that any publicly available data is open for web scraping. However, some techniques make it hard to benefit from web scraping:
- Sites may block an IP address
- There can be an option of deactivating web service API
- Sites might employ honeypot or other tricky methods
- There are some services, commercial ones, that have anti-bot applications
Despite the methods of protection of the information, it’s important to know that would need to adhere to every website’s internal rules in regards to information gathering and if you’re facing problems with scraping, it can be a good idea to find another alternative to obtain the data.
Why is information important in the business sector? What are the advantages of data extraction from a particular website? Actually, there are many benefits such as pricing comparison, revenue optimization, competitor monitoring, investment decision making and so on. There are a lot of use cases where web scraping can be practical, critical and insightful.
Read: Best free WordPress themes for 2020
But why is scraping so demanded nowadays?
Actually, there are many reasons behind it, and it’s about having access to myriads of information that can be used for various purposes. For example, a wordpress theme company wants to know the prices of their competitors. Web scraping is useful for a number of reasons including :
- Monitor stock prices
- Gathering data from yellow pages for generating the leads
- Market purposes and price monitoring
- Monitoring competitors
- Statistics of weather, sports, clubs, and so on
- Getting data before site migration
- Prices comparison
- Financial research
- Useful insights
Conclusion
Web scraping has become a practical tool for fetching and extracting data from websites, platforms or yellow pages. The purposes may vary, but one thing is that there are a lot of commercial services that can be resorted to.
Read: Why Web data collection is the future
Since doing it manually isn’t a great idea, implementing software can be a good solution. Despite sites’ attempts to protect their data, there are great techniques that may surpass all barriers. Every site can be subjected to web scraping but web data scraping is considered to be illegal if the information therein is copyrighted. Thus, before using web data scraping services, you must understand the legal and ethical aspects of each website.
If you like the content, we would appreciate your support by buying us a coffee. Thank you so much for your visit and support.
