Simple Free Automated Web Scraping
If you’re not scraping data, how are you going to remain competitive?
Introduction
Data is king. There is no way around it. 80% of the value you get from building a machine learning model can come from a simple off-the-shelf solution. With this modern simplicity, how do you differentiate yourself or your company? The answer is the data. Your best model is only as good as the data you provide it. You can get serious gains by finding a unique data source or managing to acquire more data than your competitors.
In this series of blog posts, I’m going to talk about how to use my new favorite tool for web scraping and data collection. The goal is for you to start building datasets of your own in a reliable and automated way. By the end of this blog post you will know how to:
- Setup a simple data collection task in the cloud.
- Make that data collection task run every day, reliably, for free.
This tutorial will use JavaScript, which is the native language most of Apify’s documentation uses. In the next post I’ll walk through how to do something similar in Python.
Apify
Apify is a platform built around web automation with a focus on data collection. They provide…
