The Advantages & Disadvantages Of Web Scraping Data

Knowledge is power. Data is liberating." To gain access to one of the best pieces of information, you’re first going to want to collect some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are effective methods that help you 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 number of the useful use cases for scraping data.

What's web scraping?
Web scraping refers to creating or using a computer software to extract data from total websites or a number of web pages. Additionally when you carry out web scraping, you'll be able to either download the whole web web page or key aspects such as the tag or article body content material for further analysis.


What are the benefits of web scraping for enterprise?
Achieve Automation
Robust web scrapers will let you automatically extract data from websites, this permits you or your co-workers to save lots of time that may’ve have otherwise been spent on mundane data assortment tasks. It also means that you can collect data at better quantity than a single human might ever hope to achieve.

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

Enterprise Intelligence & Insights
Web scraping data from the internet permits you to 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 better image of your market, your competitor’s activity which in flip will lead to better enterprise determination making.

Unique and rich datasets
The internet provides you with a rich amount of text, image, video and numerical data and at the moment contains no less than 6.05 billion pages. Relying upon what your goal is, yow will discover related websites, setup website crawlers and then make your own custom dataset for analysis.

For instance, let’s pretend you’re considering UK football and want to understand the sports market in depth.

You can setup webscapers to collect the following information:

Video Content: To download all the football games from YouTube or Facebook.com.
Football Statistics: You might download your desired group’s historical match statistics.
WhoScored – Goal Data.
SoccerStats.
Betting Odds: You could possibly gather the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s comparable to Bet365 or from player betting exchanges reminiscent of Betfair or Smarkets.
Create applications for tools that don’t have a public developer API
By web scraping data, you will never need to depend on the website releasing a public application programming interface (API) to access the data which they show on their webpages. There are a number of benefits to web scraping compared to accessing a public API:

You possibly can access and gather any data that is available on their website.
You aren't limited to a selected number of queries.
You don’t should 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'll like to collect from a range of websites, then you possibly can accurately gather it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling techniques your data will be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a every day basis.

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

What are the disadvantages?
You will must be taught programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer
If you are looking to gather and organise an unlimited quantity of data from the internet, you will find that current web scraping software is limited in functionality. Though the software could be good for extracting several parts from a web web page, as quickly as that you must crawl a number of websites they're less effective.

Subsequently you will need to either spend money on learning web scraping techniques in a programming language resembling javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you'll be able to hire a freelance web scraping developer, regardless each of those two approaches will add an overhead to your data assortment operations.

Websites recurrently change their construction and crawlers require upkeep
As websites repeatedly change their HTML structure, typically your crawlers will break. Whether or not you’re using web scraping software or you’re writing the web scraping code, there's a certain amount of upkeep that needs to be frequently performed to keep your data assortment pipelines clean and operational.

For every website that you just write a custom encoding script, adds on a specific amount of technical debt. If plenty of websites that you simply’re amassing data from all of the sudden decide to redesign their websites, you will must invest in fixing your crawlers.

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