Tuesday 25 June 2019

What Kind of Companies Use Web Scrapers

Since a considerable amount of time, we have discussed a lot about scraping data from websites, what the available tools are, what approach and methods to take, what to avoid, and many other things with the end goal to make sure that you reap the most benefits of scraping data from websites. However, this time, we have come up with this post that includes various sorts of companies that often scrape data from websites on their own or by hiring web scraping services. So, without wasting any time, let us have a look at them in brief:

Price Comparison Sites

Price comparison sites are perhaps one of the most common businesses that often scrape data from websites. Such businesses completely depend on scraper bots or web scraping services to present their customers with a simple and clear pricing data. The need to scrape data from websites could have not been fulfilled using conventional data scraping methods.

Ecommerce

In the domain of e-commerce, even a single sale is of utmost importance. If you know what your potential customers are buying, at what price are they buying, where they are buying from, etc. you can easily uplift your sales in this competitive market era. By providing your customers with a superior product or something at a lower price, you can earn a huge base of customers for your business online. Data scraping services can simplify the process of scraping data from websites for you.

Recruitment

No companies would ever want to hire someone for a job role who would bring no profit to their business. Scanning through thousands of resumes and CVs on thousands of job portals manually to look for a suitable candidate can be quite expensive and time-consuming as well. This is where you need a scraper bot to scrape data from websites and present yourself with a list of thousands of potential candidates that you can hire for the benefit of your business.

There are hundreds of other businesses and companies, apart from the above-mentioned ones, that use scraper bots to scrape data from websites for various purposes. The advantages of web scraping are endless.

What Is a Price Scraper Service?

Different people say different things about marketing and running a business. Some people even say that it is easy to set up a business, but keeping it running successfully is a very tough job that not everyone can achieve. The latest buzzword related to businesses is, “price scraper service”. If you are into business, you must have come across this term for sure. Being a business owner, you need to be informed about price scraper service so that you can utilize it for the benefit of your business. Price scraper service can be especially beneficial for you if you are into ecommerce industry, say professionals, offering web scraping service.

What Is a Price Scraper Service?

A price scraper is nothing but a piece of scraper bot designed to crawl ecommerce websites and extract the pricing information of various products. That being said, we would also like to let you know that the power of a price scraper service is just not limited to extracting pricing information of the various products, it can also be used to scrape product catalog information and much more, say professionals, offering web scraping service.

There are many functions of a price scraper. Let have a look at some of them in brief:

Crawling Data

Just like you browse a website to look for the needed information, a price scraper crawls numerous websites at a lightning speed and all the links within to look for the needed data.

Scraping Data

In this step, your price scraper bot will scrape data. It collects the required data right off the website quickly and efficiently.

Extracting Data

This is a kind of refining process. In this step, the price scraper extracts the meaningful data that it has scrapped out of various websites. You are ought to make sure that you select only those that you really need. Collection of useless data can slow down the process, say professionals, offering web scraping service.

Formatting the Data

You would not be able to comprehend data unless it has been formatted well. You can set your price scraper to format data in various formats, such as CSV, XML, and so on.

Exporting the Data

This is a final step in which you can export your data to a storage system, such as Dropbox, or any other storage device. Using Dropbox has an added advantage that enables you to access the data from anywhere.

Thursday 20 June 2019

5 Important Reasons You Should Not Build Your Own Scraper Bot

web scraping services

Web scraping services have the potential to reshape your business and can be much more benefitting. The principle of web scraping relies on extracting data from websites. That said, we would also like to let you know that there are a large number of scraper bot available in the market that can enable you scrape data from websites. Along with scrapping the required data for you, these scraper bot can also convert the unstructured scraped data into a structured format of your choice. Building your own scraper bot demands extensive experience and tools, along with long time period. In addition, it may turn out to be very expensive for you.

With this post, we are going to present you with a couple of reasons why you should hire web scraping services rather than building your own scraper bot. So, without wasting any time, let us have a look at them in brief:

1 – Regular Maintenance

Similar to a website or any application, scraper bot demands maintenance on regular basic. In some cases, it has been noticed that the maintenance cost of scraper bot exceeds the initial building cost of the same. The process of keeping up a scraper bot can impart a great burden financially on your business and organization.

2 – Cost issues

The cost of building a scraper bot can’t be ignored when it comes to receiving an effective solution for the data scraping needs of your business. The investment that you are ought to make in building a scraper bot can be considerably greater than hiring web scraping services.

3 – Finding the right data

Not all data would be beneficial for your business. The data that are relevant to your business can only provide you with fruitful results. A typical scraper bot would not be able to scrape data from each and every websites because some websites place shields that restrict data extraction. In such cases, you will be required to customize your scraper bot that will consume a lot of time.

Owing to all the above mentioned factors, it would be an unquestionable idea to hire web scraping services rather than creating your own scraper bot for your data extraction needs.