The Dark Side of Web Scraping

Web scraping, also referred to as data scraping, screen scraping, data harvesting and so forth, is a method of extracting data/information from websites into a spreadsheet or local file saved on your computer. It is considered as one of most suitable approach to acquire data from the World Wide Web, and in some cases to channel that data to another website.

Businesses hire web scraping services for different purposes, such as, for web content research, business intelligence research, price comparison, finding sales leads, conducting market research by crawling public data sources, sending product data from an e-commerce site to another online vendor and so forth.

“There are numerous positive uses of web scraping; however it gets misused by a small minority as well”, says professionals of web scraping services.

The most common misuse of web scraping is email harvesting. Email harvesting is all about the scraping of information from sites, social media and directories to reveal individuals' email addresses, which are then sold on to spammers or scammers. In a few jurisdictions, utilizing techniques like web scraping to gather email addresses with commercial intent is not legal, and it is almost universally considered bad marketing practice.

Many internet users have embraced methods to avoid the danger of email harvesters getting hold of their email address, including:

• Address munging: altering the format of your email address when posting it openly, e.g. using 'james[at]gmail.com' rather than 'james@gmail.com'. This is a simple yet marginally unreliable way to protect your email address on social media. “A few harvesters are surely going to look for different munged combinations and also emails in a normal format, so it's not, by any means, fully reliable”, says professionals of web scraping services.
• Contact forms: utilizing contact forms as opposed to posting your email addresses on your website.
• Pictures: if your email address is presented in image form on your website, it will be past the technological reach of a large amount of people associated with email harvesting.

If you are looking forward to hire web scraping services, you are at the right place. BotScraper’s web scraping services blends unique technology and excellent technique to dig deep into the internet to find every bit of data and convert it into meaningful information to help you decide the growth of your business.

Comparing Scraping Software to DIY Scraping Tools

In case, if you need to scrape data from website, there are two options that you can take into consideration –

• Utilizing a DIY web scraping platforms (like extract.io, mozenda)
• By hiring a developer that will write the code to scrape data.

Here, with this post, we are going to take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of both the techniques. Let us begin.

DIY Platforms

Platforms like extract.io, Mozenda, and so on are exceptionally well known face in the field of web scarping. They are huge organizations and spent a large amount of money on marketing, promotions, and so forth, that is the reason why they are popular.

If the below mentioned conditions are true, you can scrape website with software. Let us look at them –

• If a website is fairly easy, you can scrape website with software.
• If you have enough time to learn how to scrape website with software.
• You can scrape website with software if the data is not large (like thousands of pages). It will cost you much.
• You can scrape website with software, if your requirements are simple, you just want to scrape data and export it to csv.

Custom web crawlers

Custom web crawlers can do anything that you require. You just need to be able to locate a dependable developer who can develop web crawlers and prepare a requirements document that will help the developer to understand your requirements. There is a long list of things, such as, it is cheap, fast, time saving and so forth that can be achieved with the custom built scraper, which you cannot achieve while trying to scrape website with software.

Wrapping Up

DIY platforms works good with straightforward data scraping, however they have extremely restricted features and needs you to invest time and energy in learning how to scrape website with software.

Custom web crawlers can do anything, there is no restriction, no need to learn any software, just locate a good professional web scraping company to create scraper for you, let them know your requirements and get the required data.