The digital market is on the rise, nowadays data has become a digital asset for businesses to fuel their company objectives and formulate effective customer-centric market decisions. In this age of abundance of information, you can never deny the importance of the right information needed for your business’s predictive advantage over market competition. Data can add a lot of power to your product advertisement strategies and can help prepare you to deal with clients by providing a personalized customer experience. The Big Data market has risen from $122 billion in 2015 to $189 billion in 2019 which is a lot of revenue!

 

Data by IDC predicts that in 2022 the overall worth of the market will cross $274 billion. Businesses that depend on data to carry out their day-to-day business operations need to automate their processes through data visualization and Artificially Intelligent platforms. For example, Salesforce paid a huge sum of $15.7 billion for Tableau, an interactive data visualization platform while Google Cloud paid $2.6 billion to purchase Looker. Both Google and Salesforce have shifted their business ML and AI algorithms to increase information gathering. Furthermore, your business can also gather immense data-related benefits by using a web scraping tool.

 

What Is A Web Scraper?

 

Many business owners want to access all the Internet information which is available out there but they lack the skill and tools to make use of such information at a broader level. Those that have ample knowledge also face the same issue when collecting information using a web scraper. It is not easy to maintain a web scraping tool since each website is different and undergoes a structural change phase. A web scraper is a tool that helps to automate your business data processes by capturing online information. A web scraper can index, crawl, scrape and store information in your desired format like CSV and JSON. You can easily subject the collected data to business analysis for creating actionable business insights. Web scraping gives you control over reliable information sources and is a comparatively faster data accessing method than other data extraction methods. With web scraping, you can forget about the traditional copy and paste methods.

 

How Does Web Scraping Works?

Web scraping tools can let you harvest various forms of data including customer email addresses, texts, images, videos, and potential customer phone numbers. Your web scraper can be customized to consider your research objectives by formulating specific algorithms. Your web scraper can be tailored depending on your business fields such as financial data, real estate listings, prices, customer reviews, newspaper headlines or competitor product listings, and more. These bots are programmed to carry out web scraping activities as per your business requirements, one of the popular web scraping methods is

 

The bot will send requests to the target website URL and then after it is granted access it will access information and download the HTML data directly from the website.

Using web scrapers you can effectively parse the whole website data and extract only relevant information like headings, sub-headings, page titles, links, and more.

The scraping bot will let you store and save the extracted information in an accessible and readable file format or a database.

 

Is Web Scraping Legal?

 

 

But is web scraping legal? This is a popular question that has become a continuous issue. First of all, it is noteworthy fact that search engines greatly depend on data scraping, and second of all, various businesses rely on web scraping data for profit-making. For example, Google scrapes information to develop its database of web pages from all fields worldwide. Since Google does it for indexing information many websites allow Google bots to crawl their website information. Certain websites condemn this act by following the copyright infringement and trespass laws. A US court granted access to a data analytics firm HiQ to scrape LinkedIn’s public profile data and put the matter to rest. The ruling of the court was in favor of scraping public information and termed it fair play. However, there are other forms of web scraping that are illegal for instance in cases if the information is not meant for commercial use. Raw copyrighted data can not be re-used and information from locked websites (heavy authentication in place) can also not be accessed using simple algorithms. Despite publicly available information can be scraped for commercial purposes some websites deliberately limit the process by setting up hindrances. You can clear all obstacles using complex coding skills and heavily programmed bots.

 

How Does Web Scraping Increase Your Business Efficiency?

 

Websites are 24/7 performing so their user interface changes therefore, you must modify your web scraping tool for 100% effective web scraping results.

Some websites employ honeypot traps to sabotage your scraping bots. Beware of such traps to prevent your scraper IP address from being blocked or blacklisted. It is necessary to take precautionary measures to limit your scraper tool’s traversal depth.

To maximize your web scraping power you must use high-end web scrapers on complex websites with unlimited anti-scraping measures in place just like CAPTCHAs.

Make sure that all your web scrapers deliver targeted and accurate information which can be stored in standard formats like PDFs and subjected to strategic business analysis for a prosperous company’s future.

Conclusion –

 

Web scraping can grab you a variety of useful and ready-made information which can help you to monitor your brand product price positioning in a better manner. In addition, you can conduct other research regarding company lead generation and competition analysis. Thus, a web scraping tool is a reliable option to get your hands on fast, accurate, and efficient information for boosting your business performance level.

 

Web scraping is a good option especially if you belong to an eCommerce field. Web scraping can help you to get your hands on your real-time eCommerce website. Real-time information can be extracted to make up better business strategies and decisions in time for better business growth. You can further simplify your data extraction journey with Python. You can extract data efficiently and faster which are the two biggest concerns of data scientists. Apart from this, it is significant to use a proxy to protect your IP address from getting blocked. Python combined with a secure proxy server is the baseline for a successful web scraping process.

 

At Information Transformation Service (ITS), you get to enjoy an array of data processing services. Our data scientists have expertise in Big Data and provide market competitive results every time. If you are interested in ITS Web Scraping Services, you can ask for a free quote and our representative will get back to you within 24 business hours!