The Advantages & Disadvantages of Web Scraping Data
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Knowledge is power. Information is liberating.” To gain access to the best pieces of knowledge, you’re first going to want to collect some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are efficient strategies that mean you can easily compile and store info from websites on the internet.
In this piece we will investigate what is web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and a few of the helpful use cases for scraping data.
What’s web scraping?
Web scraping refers to creating or utilizing a computer software to extract data from complete websites or a number of web pages. Also if you perform web scraping, you may either download all the web web page or key features such as the
What are the benefits of web scraping for business?
Achieve Automation
Robust web scrapers let you automatically extract data from websites, this allows you or your co-workers to avoid wasting time that may’ve have in any other case been spent on mundane data assortment tasks. It additionally means which you can acquire data at greater quantity than a single human may ever hope to achieve.
Also it’s possible so that you can create sophisticated web bots to automate online activities with either web scraping software or utilizing a programming language equivalent to javascript, python, go or php.
Business Intelligence & Insights
Web scraping data from the internet lets you search for competitor prices, monitor their marketing activity and to swiftly market research your trade online. By downloading, cleaning and analysing data at significant volume, you’ll be able to build a better picture of your market, your competitor’s activity which in turn will lead to better enterprise choice making.
Unique and rich datasets
The internet provides you with a rich amount of text, image, video and numerical data and currently incorporates at the least 6.05 billion pages. Depending upon what your goal is, you will discover relevant websites, setup website crawlers after which make your own customized dataset for analysis.
For example, let’s fake you’re excited about UK football and want to understand the sports market in depth.
You possibly can setup webscapers to gather the following information:
Video Content: To download the entire football games from YouTube or Facebook.com.
Football Statistics: You can download your desired staff’s historical match statistics.
WhoScored – Goal Data.
SoccerStats.
Betting Odds: You might collect the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s akin to Bet365 or from player betting exchanges equivalent 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 must depend 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 possibly can access and acquire any data that’s 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 have to abide by their rules.
Efficient Data Administration
Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you may choose what data you’d like to collect from a range of websites, then you’ll be able to accurately collect it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling methods your data will be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a every day basis.
Storing data with automatic software and programs signifies that your organization, operations or workers can spend less time copying and pasting info and more time on creative work.
What are the disadvantages?
You will need to study programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer
If you’re looking to collect and organise a vast amount of data from the internet, you will find that present web scraping software is limited in functionality. Though the software will be good for extracting a number of parts from a web page, as quickly as you might want to crawl multiple websites they are less effective.
Due to this fact you will must either spend money on learning web scraping methods in a programming language comparable to javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you possibly can hire a contract web scraping developer, regardless both of those approaches will add an overhead to your data collection operations.
Websites usually change their structure and crawlers require upkeep
As websites frequently change their HTML structure, sometimes your crawlers will break. Whether you’re utilizing web scraping software otherwise you’re writing the web scraping code, there is a certain quantity of upkeep that must be recurrently carried out to keep your data assortment pipelines clean and operational.
For each website that you simply write a customized encoding script, adds on a certain quantity of technical debt. If a lot of websites that you simply’re collecting data from all of a sudden determine to redesign their websites, you will have to spend money on fixing your crawlers.
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