A Comprehensive Guide on Offering Web Scraping Services

What is web scraping?

In simple terms, web scraping is a technique of collecting information from the World Wide Web. Web scraping service is for individuals who have a goal in mind, such as, “I want all names, phone numbers, addresses and email addresses for every contact on this directory”, and the professionals offering web scraping service would scrape that website utilizing some programs to extract that information and export it to the desired format, such as, Excel, JSON, XML and so forth.

What do people use scraping service for?

There are hundreds of scenarios where people make use of scraping service to scrape data from the website. Below are some typical uses of scraping service. Let us have a look at them:

• To scrape lead information from directories: contact information or company information to populate CRMs and so forth.
• For Market research: price scraping, information of products from E-Commerce website, trips on travel sites or property information from real estate sites, vehicles on dealership sites, etc.
• To collect data from various sites for research purposes.
• Scrape data from an old website to move the content over to a new website, where export or API is not available.
• To scrape rates of stock or cryptocurrency.
• To scrape reviews and comments for sentiment analysis.

There are two ways to scrape data from website - Custom web scrapers and Web scraping software. Custom web scrapers are built by programmers utilizing various programming languages, while, web scraping software are nothing but tools that let you scrape website without any programming knowledge requirement. Be that as it may, there are some disadvantages with utilizing web scraping software. Web scraping software would not be able to scrape data from complex websites; you will have to invest time into learning the software; in some cases, you will have to be more technical to use more advanced features as well.

Is web scraping legal?

In most of the cases, web scraping is legal. While we cannot provide legal expertise, we would suggest you to read some of the following literature and always check the terms and conditions of the website you are scraping.

Final Words

To sum up, we would say that, hiring professionals, offering web scraping service, would be better than the best for you, so as to avoid any issues that you might face owing to lack of knowledge in scraping and using DIY method.