The Advantages & Disadvantages of Web Scraping Data
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“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating.” To gain access to the perfect pieces of data, you’re first going to need to collect some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are efficient methods that mean you can simply compile and store information from websites on the internet.
In this piece we’ll examine what is web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and some of the helpful use cases for scraping data.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping refers to creating or using a computer software to extract data from entire websites or just a few web pages. Additionally while you carry out web scraping, you possibly can either download the whole web page or key aspects such because the
What are the benefits of web scraping for business?
Achieve Automation
Strong web scrapers can help you 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 collection tasks. It also means that you would be able to acquire data at greater volume than a single human might ever hope to achieve.
Additionally it’s doable 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 allows you to search for competitor costs, 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 better image of your market, your competitor’s activity which in turn will lead to higher enterprise determination making.
Unique and rich dataunits
The internet provides you with a rich quantity of text, image, video and numerical data and at present contains a minimum of 6.05 billion pages. Depending upon what your goal is, you could find related websites, setup website crawlers after which make your own custom dataset for analysis.
For instance, let’s fake you’re focused on UK football and wish to understand the sports market in depth.
You possibly can setup webscapers to collect the next information:
Video Content: To download all of the 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 could possibly collect the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s equivalent to Bet365 or from player betting exchanges akin to Betfair or Smarkets.
Create applications for tools that don’t have a public developer API
By web scraping data, you will by no means 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 may access and accumulate any data that is available on their website.
You aren’t limited to a selected number of queries.
You don’t should sign up for an API key or need to abide by their rules.
Effective Data Administration
Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you’ll be able to choose what data you’d like to gather from a range of websites, then you’ll be able to accurately gather 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 daily basis.
Storing data with computerized software and programs implies that your organization, operations or workers can spend less time copying and pasting data and more time on inventive work.
What are the disadvantages?
You will want to be taught programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer
In case you are looking to collect and organise a vast amount of data from the internet, you can see that existing web scraping software is limited in functionality. Though the software will be good for extracting several components from a web page, as quickly as you must crawl multiple websites they are less effective.
Subsequently you will need to either put money into learning web scraping methods in a programming language equivalent to javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you’ll be able to hire a freelance web scraping developer, regardless both of those approaches will add an overhead to your data assortment operations.
Websites recurrently change their construction and crawlers require upkeep
As websites commonly change their HTML construction, generally your crawlers will break. Whether or not you’re using web scraping software or you’re writing the web scraping code, there’s a certain amount of maintenance that must be recurrently performed to keep your data collection pipelines clean and operational.
For every website that you simply write a custom encoding script, adds on a certain amount of technical debt. If lots of websites that you simply’re collecting data from immediately resolve to redesign their websites, you will have to spend money on fixing your crawlers.
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