The Advantages & Disadvantages of Web Scraping Data
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“Knowledge is power. Data is liberating.” To achieve access to the perfect items of knowledge, you’re first going to want to gather some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are effective methods that can help you easily compile and store information from websites on the internet.
In this piece we are going to investigate what’s web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and some of the beneficial use cases for scraping data.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping refers to creating or utilizing a computer software to extract data from entire websites or a few web pages. Additionally if you perform web scraping, you can either download the whole web web page or key points 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 avoid wasting time that would’ve have in any other case been spent on mundane data collection tasks. It also means that you could collect data at better quantity than a single human may ever hope to achieve.
Additionally it’s doable for you to create sophisticated web bots to automate online activities with either web scraping software or using a programming language corresponding 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 quantity, you’ll be able to build a greater image of your market, your competitor’s activity which in flip will lead to raised enterprise resolution making.
Distinctive and rich datasets
The internet provides you with a rich amount of textual content, image, video and numerical data and currently contains at the least 6.05 billion pages. Relying upon what your goal is, you’ll find related websites, setup website crawlers and then make your own customized dataset for analysis.
For example, let’s fake you’re keen on UK football and need to understand the sports market in depth.
You can setup webscapers to collect the following information:
Video Content: To download the entire football games from YouTube or Facebook.com.
Football Statistics: You possibly can download your desired workforce’s historical match statistics.
WhoScored – Goal Data.
SoccerStats.
Betting Odds: You could possibly accumulate the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s akin 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 have 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 in comparison to accessing a public API:
You possibly can access and accumulate any data that is available on their website.
You are not limited to a particular number of queries.
You don’t have to sign up for an API key or need to abide by their rules.
Efficient Data Administration
Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you can select what data you’ll like to gather from a range of websites, then you possibly can accurately acquire it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling techniques your data shall be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a every day basis.
Storing data with automatic software and programs implies that your organization, operations or employees can spend less time copying and pasting info and more time on creative work.
What are the disadvantages?
You’ll need to study programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer
If you’re looking to collect and organise an enormous amount of information from the internet, you will discover that current web scraping software is limited in functionality. Although the software might be good for extracting a number of parts from a web web page, as quickly as you must crawl multiple websites they’re less effective.
Therefore you will have to either invest in learning web scraping strategies in a programming language akin to javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you can hire a freelance web scraping developer, regardless each of those approaches will add an overhead to your data assortment operations.
Websites regularly change their structure and crawlers require maintenance
As websites regularly change their HTML construction, sometimes your crawlers will break. Whether you’re using web scraping software otherwise you’re writing the web scraping code, there’s a specific amount of upkeep that needs to be repeatedly carried out to keep your data assortment pipelines clean and operational.
For every website that you write a custom encoding script, adds on a certain quantity of technical debt. If a number of websites that you just’re amassing data from all of a sudden decide to redesign their websites, you have to to invest in fixing your crawlers.
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