The Advantages & Disadvantages of Web Scraping Data

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

In this piece we'll examine what's web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and a number of the useful use cases for scraping data.

What's web scraping?

Web scraping refers to creating or utilizing a computer software to extract data from entire websites or a few web pages. Additionally while you carry out web scraping, you can either download the complete web web page or key elements such because the tag or article body content for further analysis.

What are the benefits of web scraping for business?

Achieve Automation

Strong web scrapers permit you to automatically extract data from websites, this allows you or your co-workers to avoid wasting time that would’ve have in any other case been spent on mundane data assortment tasks. It additionally means that you could acquire data at better quantity than a single human could ever hope to achieve.

Also it’s attainable so that you can create sophisticated web bots to automate online activities with either web scraping software or utilizing a programming language akin to javascript, python, go or php.

Business Intelligence & Insights

Web scraping data from the internet means that you can seek for competitor costs, monitor their marketing activity and to swiftly market research your trade online. By downloading, cleaning and analysing data at significant quantity, you’ll be able to build a better picture of your market, your competitor’s activity which in flip will lead to better enterprise choice making.

Unique and rich datasets

The internet provides you with a rich quantity of text, image, video and numerical data and at present incorporates not less than 6.05 billion pages. Relying upon what your goal is, you can find relevant websites, setup website crawlers and then make your own custom dataset for analysis.

For example, let’s fake you’re thinking about UK football and want to understand the sports market in depth.

You could setup webscapers to collect the next data:

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

Football Statistics: You could possibly download your desired workforce’s historical match statistics.

WhoScored – Goal Data.

SoccerStats.

Betting Odds: You can gather the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s akin to Bet365 or from player betting exchanges such as Betfair or Smarkets.

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

By web scraping data, you'll by no means must depend on the website releasing a public application programming interface (API) to access the data which they show on their webpages. There are several benefits to web scraping in comparison to accessing a public API:

You'll be able to access and gather any data that is available on their website.

You are not limited to a particular number of queries.

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

Effective Data Management

Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you'll be able to choose what data you'll like to gather from a range of websites, then you may accurately collect it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling techniques your data will probably be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a daily basis.

Storing data with computerized software and programs implies that your company, operations or employees can spend less time copying and pasting data and more time on artistic work.

What are the disadvantages?

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

If you are 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. Though the software will be good for extracting several elements from a web web page, as quickly as you must crawl multiple websites they are less effective.

Subsequently you will need to either invest in learning web scraping methods in a programming language reminiscent of javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you may hire a contract web scraping developer, regardless each of those approaches will add an overhead to your data collection operations.

Websites repeatedly change their construction and crawlers require upkeep

As websites regularly change their HTML construction, generally your crawlers will break. Whether you’re utilizing web scraping software otherwise you’re writing the web scraping code, there is a specific amount of maintenance that must be regularly carried out to keep your data assortment pipelines clean and operational.

For each website that you just write a customized encoding script, adds on a certain amount of technical debt. If lots of websites that you’re accumulating data from instantly resolve to redesign their websites, you will want to spend money on fixing your crawlers.

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