The Advantages & Disadvantages of Web Scraping Data
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“Knowledge is power. Data is liberating.” To gain access to the perfect pieces of information, you’re first going to wish to gather some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are efficient methods that mean you can easily compile and store data from websites on the internet.
In this piece we’ll investigate 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 using a computer software to extract data from entire websites or a number of web pages. Also whenever you carry out web scraping, you possibly can either download the whole web page or key elements such as the
What are the benefits of web scraping for business?
Achieve Automation
Robust web scrapers assist you to automatically extract data from websites, this permits you or your co-workers to save time that might’ve have in any other case been spent on mundane data collection tasks. It also means that you could accumulate data at greater volume than a single human might ever hope to achieve.
Also it’s possible for you to create sophisticated web bots to automate online activities with either web scraping software or using a programming language resembling javascript, python, go or php.
Business Intelligence & Insights
Web scraping data from the internet permits you to seek for competitor prices, monitor their marketing activity and to swiftly market research your business online. By downloading, cleaning and analysing data at significant quantity, you’ll be able to build a greater image of your market, your competitor’s activity which in flip will lead to higher business decision making.
Unique and rich datasets
The internet provides you with a rich amount of textual content, image, video and numerical data and at present comprises no less than 6.05 billion pages. Relying upon what your objective is, you will discover relevant websites, setup website crawlers and then make your own customized dataset for analysis.
For example, let’s pretend you’re interested by UK football and need to understand the sports market in depth.
You could setup webscapers to gather the following information:
Video Content: To download all of the football games from YouTube or Facebook.com.
Football Statistics: You could download your desired crew’s historical match statistics.
WhoScored – Goal Data.
SoccerStats.
Betting Odds: You could possibly gather the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s equivalent 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 will never have to rely 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 may access and accumulate 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 have to 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’d like to collect from a range of websites, then you’ll be able to accurately acquire it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling strategies your data will likely be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a each day basis.
Storing data with automated software and programs signifies that your organization, operations or staff can spend less time copying and pasting info and more time on inventive work.
What are the disadvantages?
You will need to learn programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer
In case you are looking to collect and organise an unlimited quantity of information from the internet, you’ll discover that existing web scraping software is limited in functionality. Although the software might be good for extracting several elements from a web page, as soon as it’s essential crawl a number of websites they’re less effective.
Therefore you will have to either invest in learning web scraping techniques in a programming language comparable to javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you can hire a freelance web scraping developer, regardless both of these approaches will add an overhead to your data assortment operations.
Websites commonly change their construction and crawlers require maintenance
As websites commonly change their HTML construction, typically your crawlers will break. Whether you’re utilizing web scraping software or you’re writing the web scraping code, there is a specific amount of maintenance that needs to be usually carried out to keep your data assortment pipelines clean and operational.
For every website that you just write a customized encoding script, adds on a certain quantity of technical debt. If numerous websites that you simply’re gathering data from all of a sudden decide to redesign their websites, you will have to invest in fixing your crawlers.
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