WEB SCRAPING (The easy way to boost profits)
Web scraping is defined as the process of taking out structured web data in an automated fashion. It’s also known as web data extraction. Some of the main use cases of web scraping consist of price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation and market research among many others.
Normally, web scraping is used by people and businesses who desire to use the large amount of publicly available web data to make more clever decisions.
If you’ve ever copied and pasted data from a webpage, you have performed the similar function as a typical web scraper, only on a microscopic, manual scale. Unlike the mundane, mind-numbing procedure of self extracting data, web scraping uses sharp automation to get almost infinite amount of data points from the internet’s never ending frontier.
Web scraping’s popularity in recent years, based on Google trends:
And it isn’t surprising as web scraping provides something really important that nothing else can: it gives you structured web data from any oprn website.
THE PROCESS
This is what a general web scraping process looks like:
1) Identify target website.
2) Collect LINKS of the pages where you desire to extract information from.
3) Make a request to the LINKS for the HTML of the page.
4) Use locators to find the information in the HTML.
5) Save the data in a JSON or CSV file or any other structured format.
The Crawler
A web crawler, which we normally call a “spider,” is an artificial intelligence that hoovers over the internet to index and search for information by following URLs and exploring, like a person with a large amount of time on their hands. In many projects you first “crawl” the web or one particular website to find URLs which then you pass on your scraper.
The Scraper
A web scraper is a specialized thing made for accurately and quickly extracting the data from a web page. Web scrapers vary widely in architecture and complexity, based on the project. An important part of every scraper is the data locators (or selectors) that are used to find the data that you want to extract from the HTML file - usually xpath, css selectors, regex or a group of them is made to work.
APPLICATIONS OF WEB SCRAPING
1) Price intelligence
In our experience, price intelligence is the largest use case for web scraping. Getting product and pricing data from e-commerce websites, then converting it into intelligence is a vital part of modern e-commerce organisations that desire to make better pricing/marketing decisions based on data.
2) Market research
Market analysis is critical – and must be run by the most exact information available. High quality, high volume, and highly insightful web scraped data of every type is acting as a fuel for market analysis and business intelligence across the globe.
3) Alternative data for finance
Unearth alpha and radically create value with web data tailored specifically for investors. The decision-making process has never been as informed, nor data as insightful – and the world’s leading firms are increasingly consuming web scraped data, given its incredible strategic value.
4) Real Estate
The digital change of real estate in the recent years threatens to disrupt old firms and create extensive new players in the industry. By implanting web scraped product data into daily business, agents and brokerages can act as a shield against top-down online competition and create informed decisions inside the market itself.
5) News & Content Monitoring
Modern media can create spectacular value or an existential threat to your trade - in a single news cycle. If you’re a company that is dependent on timely news analysis, or a company that appears in the news time to time, web scraping news data is the ultimate solution for watching, summing up and parsing the most crucial stories from your company.
There are many other areas where this web scraping can be used such as Lead generation, Brand monitoring, Business automation, MAP monitoring etc.
