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The Advantages & Disadvantages of Web Scraping Data

 

"Knowledge is power. Information is liberating." To gain access to the best pieces of knowledge, you’re first going to wish to gather some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are effective methods that mean you can simply compile and store information from websites on the internet.

 

 

In this piece we will examine what's web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and a few 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 total websites or just a few web pages. Also once you perform web scraping, you may either download your entire web web page or key elements such because the tag or article body content for additional analysis.

 

 

What are the benefits of web scraping for enterprise?

 

Achieve Automation

 

Robust web scrapers mean you can automatically extract data from websites, this permits you or your co-workers to save lots of time that will’ve have otherwise been spent on mundane data collection tasks. It additionally means which you could acquire data at higher quantity than a single human may ever hope to achieve.

 

 

Also it’s doable so that you can create sophisticated web bots to automate online activities with either web scraping software or using a programming language reminiscent of javascript, python, go or php.

 

 

Enterprise Intelligence & Insights

 

Web scraping data from the internet lets you seek for competitor costs, monitor their marketing activity and to swiftly market research your business online. By downloading, cleaning and analysing data at significant volume, you’ll be able to build a greater image of your market, your competitor’s activity which in turn will lead to better business resolution making.

 

 

Unique and rich dataunits

 

The internet provides you with a rich amount of text, image, video and numerical data and at present comprises not less than 6.05 billion pages. Depending upon what your objective is, you could find relevant websites, setup website crawlers after which make your own custom dataset for analysis.

 

 

For example, let’s faux you’re taken with UK football and need to understand the sports market in depth.

 

 

You could setup webscapers to gather the next info:

 

 

Video Content: To download all of the football games from YouTube or Facebook.com.

 

Football Statistics: You could download your desired team’s historical match statistics.

 

WhoScored – Goal Data.

 

SoccerStats.

 

Betting Odds: You would acquire the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s corresponding to Bet365 or from player betting exchanges corresponding to Betfair or Smarkets.

 

Create applications for instruments that don’t have a public developer API

 

By web scraping data, you will never need to rely 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 compared to accessing a public API:

 

 

You'll be able to access and collect any data that's available on their website.

 

You are not limited to a selected number of queries.

 

You don’t need to sign up for an API key or must abide by their rules.

 

Efficient Data Management

 

Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you may select 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 techniques your data will likely be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a daily basis.

 

 

Storing data with automatic software and programs implies that your organization, operations or staff can spend less time copying and pasting information and more time on inventive work.

 

 

What are the disadvantages?

 

You will need to be taught programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer

 

If you are looking to collect and organise an enormous amount of knowledge from the internet, you can see that present web scraping software is limited in functionality. Though the software can be good for extracting a number of elements from a web web page, as soon as it is advisable crawl a number of websites they are less effective.

 

 

Therefore you have to to either spend money on learning web scraping strategies in a programming language reminiscent of javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you'll be able to hire a contract web scraping developer, regardless both of these approaches will add an overhead to your data collection operations.

 

 

Websites often change their structure and crawlers require maintenance

 

As websites repeatedly change their HTML structure, generally your crawlers will break. Whether or not you’re using web scraping software or you’re writing the web scraping code, there is a certain quantity of upkeep that needs to be frequently carried out to keep your data collection pipelines clean and operational.

 

 

For every website that you just write a customized encoding script, adds on a specific amount of technical debt. If lots of websites that you just’re gathering data from suddenly resolve to redesign their websites, you will want to invest in fixing your crawlers.

 

 

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