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The Advantages & Disadvantages of Web Scraping Data

 

Knowledge is power. Data is liberating." To realize access to the most effective pieces of knowledge, you’re first going to need to collect some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are effective methods that permit you to simply compile and store info from websites on the internet.

 

 

In this piece we will examine what is web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and some of the useful use cases for scraping data.

 

 

What is web scraping?

 

Web scraping refers to creating or utilizing a computer software to extract data from entire websites or a couple of web pages. Also once you perform web scraping, you'll be able to either download all the web page or key points such as the tag or article body content material for further analysis.

 

 

 

What are the benefits of web scraping for business?

 

Achieve Automation

 

Strong web scrapers let you automatically extract data from websites, this allows you or your co-workers to save lots of time that might’ve have in any other case been spent on mundane data collection tasks. It additionally means which you can accumulate data at greater volume than a single human could ever hope to achieve.

 

 

Additionally it’s attainable for you to create sophisticated web bots to automate online activities with either web scraping software or utilizing a programming language equivalent to javascript, python, go or php.

 

 

Enterprise Intelligence & Insights

 

Web scraping data from the internet lets you search for competitor prices, monitor their marketing activity and to swiftly market research your industry online. By downloading, cleaning and analysing data at significant volume, you’ll be able to build a greater picture of your market, your competitor’s activity which in flip will lead to raised enterprise decision making.

 

 

Unique and rich datasets

 

The internet provides you with a rich quantity of textual content, image, video and numerical data and presently incorporates at the least 6.05 billion pages. Depending upon what your goal is, you could find relevant websites, setup website crawlers after which make your own custom dataset for analysis.

 

 

For instance, let’s fake you’re interested in UK football and need to understand the sports market in depth.

 

 

You may setup webscapers to collect the following data:

 

 

Video Content: To download the entire football games from YouTube or Facebook.com.

 

Football Statistics: You can download your desired team’s historical match statistics.

 

WhoScored – Goal Data.

 

SoccerStats.

 

Betting Odds: You would collect the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s reminiscent of Bet365 or from player betting exchanges similar to Betfair or Smarkets.

 

Create applications for tools that don’t have a public developer API

 

By web scraping data, you will never must rely on the website releasing a public application programming interface (API) to access the data which they show on their webpages. There are a number of benefits to web scraping compared to accessing a public API:

 

 

You possibly can access and accumulate any data that is available on their website.

 

You are not limited to a selected number of queries.

 

You don’t must sign up for an API key or have to abide by their rules.

 

Efficient Data Administration

 

Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you may select what data you would like to gather from a range of websites, then you can accurately accumulate it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling strategies your data will be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a day by day basis.

 

 

Storing data with computerized software and programs signifies that your organization, operations or employees can spend less time copying and pasting info and more time on creative work.

 

 

What are the disadvantages?

 

You will have to learn programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer

 

If you're looking to collect and organise a vast amount of information from the internet, you will find that present web scraping software is limited in functionality. Although the software could be good for extracting a number of parts from a web page, as quickly as it's worthwhile to crawl a number of websites they're less effective.

 

 

Subsequently you will need to either invest in learning web scraping methods in a programming language similar to javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you possibly can hire a contract web scraping developer, regardless both of those two approaches will add an overhead to your data assortment operations.

 

 

Websites commonly change their structure and crawlers require upkeep

 

As websites regularly change their HTML construction, typically your crawlers will break. Whether or not you’re utilizing web scraping software otherwise you’re writing the web scraping code, there is a specific amount of upkeep that needs to be frequently carried out to keep your data assortment pipelines clean and operational.

 

 

For each website that you just write a custom encoding script, adds on a specific amount of technical debt. If a lot of websites that you just’re accumulating data from suddenly decide to redesign their websites, you will must spend money on fixing your crawlers.

 

 

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