The Advantages & Disadvantages of Web Scraping Data

Knowledge is power. Data is liberating." To achieve access to the perfect items of information, you’re first going to wish to collect some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are effective methods that can help you easily 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's web scraping?

Web scraping refers to creating or utilizing a pc software to extract data from complete websites or a number of web pages. Additionally whenever you carry out web scraping, you can either download your entire web web page or key facets such because the tag or article body content for additional analysis.

What are the benefits of web scraping for enterprise?

Achieve Automation

Strong web scrapers assist you to automatically extract data from websites, this permits you or your co-workers to avoid wasting time that might’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 may ever hope to achieve.

Also it’s doable for you to 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.

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 image of your market, your competitor’s activity which in turn will lead to raised enterprise resolution making.

Unique and rich datasets

The internet provides you with a rich amount of text, image, video and numerical data and at present comprises a minimum of 6.05 billion pages. Relying upon what your goal is, you can find relevant websites, setup website crawlers after which make your own customized dataset for analysis.

For instance, let’s pretend you’re concerned with UK football and wish to understand the sports market in depth.

You could possibly setup webscapers to assemble the following information:

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

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

WhoScored – Goal Data.

SoccerStats.

Betting Odds: You possibly can accumulate the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s resembling Bet365 or from player betting exchanges corresponding to Betfair or Smarkets.

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

By web scraping data, you will by no means need to 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 compared to accessing a public API:

You can access and collect any data that's available on their website.

You are not limited to a selected number of queries.

You don’t need to 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 can choose what data you'll like to collect from a range of websites, then you may accurately accumulate it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling techniques your data will be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a day by day basis.

Storing data with automatic software and programs implies that your company, operations or workers can spend less time copying and pasting data and more time on inventive work.

What are the disadvantages?

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

If you are looking to collect and organise a vast amount of knowledge from the internet, you will discover that current web scraping software is limited in functionality. Though the software will be good for extracting several components from a web web page, as soon as you must crawl a number of websites they are less effective.

Due to this fact you will have to either spend money on learning web scraping techniques in a programming language similar to javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you can hire a contract web scraping developer, regardless both of those two approaches will add an overhead to your data collection operations.

Websites usually change their construction and crawlers require maintenance

As websites usually change their HTML structure, generally your crawlers will break. Whether or not you’re utilizing web scraping software otherwise you’re writing the web scraping code, there's a specific amount of maintenance that must be recurrently carried out to keep your data collection pipelines clean and operational.

For each website that you simply write a custom encoding script, adds on a certain quantity of technical debt. If a lot of websites that you’re amassing data from all of the sudden resolve to redesign their websites, you will need to invest in fixing your crawlers.

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