What Is Web Scraping?
If you need to come up with price strategies for your business, why not use price scraping software? But what does it mean about the concept of scraping? Scraping or web scraping is a means of acquiring tons of information from various sites with a particular purpose. But what is web scraping used for?
-it’s about having in-depth analysis: reaching a huge amount of data can be employed with any type of research or come up with some solutions to existing problems.
-it’s about accessing and comparing the prices: it’s quite often that people employ price scraping software tools to learn more about the price of the competitors’ products and keep the track of their own prices.
-it’s about reaching the list of email addresses: having the list of potential clients is another great technique for making your business more efficient when it comes to reaching your audience.
-it’s also convenient when you look for potential job offers, as you can get one list of the job instead of searching for them separately on different platforms.
-it’s about generating leads that can be accessed from social media, and thus, this will help you create a more accessible audience for promoting your own business.
Where is web scraping used?
Generally, you can find out that scraping works in two ways. One is known as a crawler or spider. It’s a type of AI that will search and browse the site pages on your behalf in search of the desired content.
The other one is called a scraper. It’s a software tool that is employed to get the targeted information and format that piece of information into a more convenient format like a spreadsheet or Excel file. Since it’s a practical solution in many spheres, it’s time to look at where it’s used:
Monitoring and assessment of the prices: when it comes to prices, this is one of the most popular spheres of web scraping. This allows you to make the monitoring and comparing prices. For example, it can help with the pricing of your own products or optimization of your revenues. Moreover, this is great in terms of monitoring the recent trends related to the products and their prices.
Researching, analyzing, and forecasting of the market tendencies: analysis of the market and how it changes may help you make a critical decision related to your business and give an idea of how you should proceed with your products. It may also help you monitor your competitors and their market decisions.
Providing valuable data for investors: in the age of data, information becomes a valuable asset, and scraping provides an alternative to reach more data. This, in turn, gives more opportunities for investors. For example, one of the common practices can be regarded as reviewing and monitoring recent news.
A great tool for real estate agents: real estate is shifting to a more digitalized service and thus, creating more accessible data for the possible clients becomes inevitable. Being one of the most competitive spheres, this industry makes the maximum benefits of scraping data from other sites. For example, scraping can help with the assessment of the potential value of any property to be sold.
An efficient solution for generating leads for your business: promoting or expanding your business is directly dependent on the potential audience you attract. So, with scraping software, you can generate as many potential clients as you want.
Of course, web scraping proxy has even more field of use besides the above mentioned. It’s quite common when it comes to monitoring the brands, yours and competitors ones, or reviewing the ongoing content with the monitoring of the news. Put it simply, it’s all about accessing and extracting information that you can benefit from in your research or business.
Challenges of web scraping
No matter what purpose you pursue, you better keep in mind that accessing and gathering data won’t be without its challenges. More and more, sites are protecting their platforms to a great extent by coming up with more complex algorithms and protection tools. However, challenges are not without their tips on how to avoid possible problems. Follow the tips for better scraping practice:
-emulating human behavior: since bots do multiple requests and perform scraping faster, it may raise some suspicions. So, one of the best strategies is to make these bots emulate more natural and human-like behavior.
-using several private proxy servers: such a trick can help you avoid being banned or blocked. Such a trick is great when it comes to scraping commercial sites like Amazon, eBay, or Shopify.
-building an efficient crawler: this is another great trick that you may employ. This may help you make the process less interrupted, as with conventional crawlers it might be risky to continue with scraping
-attempts to avoid honeypot traps: there are traps activated by the site, so your discretion is a must. Thus, all you need is to be sure whether a particular site has enabled such a feature or not.
Is web scraping a legal process?
Another important question is how legal to employ the services of web scraping. Much is still subject to be discussed. However, the process itself is acceptable provided that the information to be extracted is publicly available. It’s okay unless you don’t violate the privacy rules of the site and copyright laws. But in practice, this seems a bit more complicated.
Since great e-commerce sites are not willing to share the information with third parties, even though such information is publicly available. They simply complicate the process of gathering and extracting the information by setting traps, blocking IPs, setting complicated algorithms, and so on.
Conclusion
Even though web scraping can be done manually, it’s still a complicated process requiring you to know more about the process. Moreover, it’s about time. Since it’s about reaching a huge amount of data, the whole procedure may be tme-consuming. In order to have your scraping job done faster, better, and more conveniently, our service MyDataProvider can help you with that. Trust web scraping to professionals.
