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August 27, 2020 @ 9:59 AM By BRIJESH PRAJAPATI
Web scraping typically extracts large amounts of data from websites for a variety of uses such as price monitoring, enriching machine learning models, financial data aggregation, monitoring consumer sentiment, news tracking, etc. Browsers show data from a website. However, manually copy data from multiple sources for retrieval in a central place can be very tedious and time-consuming. Web scraping tools essentially automate this manual process.
“Web scraping,” also called crawling or spidering, is the automated gathering of data from an online source usually from a website. While scraping is a great way to get massive amounts of data in relatively short timeframes, it does add stress to the server where the source hosted.
Primarily why many websites disallow or ban scraping all together. However, as long as it does not disrupt the primary function of the online source, it is relatively acceptable.
Despite its legal challenges, web scraping remains popular even in 2019. The prominence and need for analytics have risen multifold. This, in turn, means various learning models and analytics engine need more raw data. Web scraping remains a popular way to collect information. With the rise of programming languages such a Python, web scraping has made significant leaps.
Social media sentiment analysis
The shelf life of social media posts is very little. However, when looked at collectively, they show valuable trends. While most social media platforms have APIs that let 3rd party tools access their data, this may not always be sufficient. In such cases scraping these websites gives access to real-time information such as trending sentiments, phrases, topics, etc.
E-Commerce pricing
Many E-Commerce sellers often have their products listed on multiple marketplaces. With scraping, they can monitor the pricing on various platforms and make a sale on the market where the profit is higher.
Investment opportunities
Real estate investors often want to know about promising neighborhoods they can invest in that. While there are multiple ways to get this data, web scraping travel marketplaces and hospitality brokerage websites offer valuable information. It includes information such as the highest-rated areas, amenities that typical buyers look for, locations that may be upcoming as attractive renting options, etc.
Machine learning
Machine learning models need raw data to evolve and improve. Web scraping tools can scrape a large number of data points, text and images in a relatively short time. Machine learning is fueling today’s technological marvels such as driverless cars, space flight, image and speech recognition. However, these models need data to improve their accuracy and reliability.
A good web scraping project follows these practices. These ensure that you get the data you are looking for while being non-disruptive to the data sources.
Any web scraping project begins with a need. A goal detailing the expected outcomes is necessary and is the most basic need for a scraping task. The following set of questions need to ask while identifying the need for a web scraping project:
Since web scraping is mostly automated, tool selection is crucial. The following points need to be kept in mind when finalizing tool selection:
Let’s assume that our scraping job collects data from job sites about open positions listed by various organizations. The data source would also dictate the schema attributes. The schema for this job would look something like this:
It is a no-brainer and a test run will help you identify any roadblocks or potential issues before running a more significant role. While there is no guarantee that there will be no surprises later on, results from the test run are a good indicator of what to expect going forward.
Once we are happy with the test run, we can now generalize the scope and move ahead with a more massive scrape. Here we need to understand how a human would retrieve data from each page. Using regular expressions, we can accurately match and retrieve the correct data. Subsequently, we also need to catch the correct XPath’s and replace them with hardcoded values if necessary. You may also need support from an external library.
Often you may need external libraries that act as inputs on the source. E.g., you may need to enter the Country, State and Zipcode to identify the correct values that you need.
Here are a few additional points to check:
Depending on the tool, end-users can access the data from web scraping in several formats:
Tools and scripts often follow a few best practices while web scraping large amounts of data.
In many cases, the scraping job may have to collect vast amounts of data. It may take too much time and encounter timeouts and endless loops. Hence tool identification and understanding its capabilities are essential. Here are a few best practices to help you better tune your scraping models for performance and reliability.
There are a few no-no’s when setting up and executing a web scraping project.
Web scraping has been around since the early days of the internet. While it can provide you the data you need, certain care, caution and restraint should exercise. A properly planned and executed web scraping project can yield valuable data – one that will be useful for the end-user.
About the author:
Hir Infotech is a leading global outsourcing company with its core focus on offering web scraping, data extraction, lead generation, data scraping, Data Processing, Digital marketing, Web Design & Development, Web Research services and developing web crawler, web scraper, web spiders, harvester, bot crawlers, and aggregators’ softwares. Our team of dedicated and committed professionals is a unique combination of strategy, creativity, and technology.