the complete guide to data scraping

THE web-scraping is known by many other names, depending on how a company likes to call it, screen scraping, data mining, and more, is a technique employed to extract large amounts of data from websites.

The data is extracted from various websites and is saved locally or on a database for instant use or analysis to be carried out later.

The data is saved in a local system or in databases, depending on the structure of the extracted data.

Summary

  1. What is web scraping?
  2. Why use web scraping?
  3. 4 use cases for web scraping

Most of the sites, which we visit regularly, only allow us to view the content and generally do not allow copying or downloading.

Manual data copying could take us weeks to complete and is very annoying.

What is web scraping?

THE Web Scraping is the automation technique this process so that a smart script can help you extract data from web pages of your choice and save it in a structured format.

A web scraping tool will automatically load multiple pages one by one and will extract the dataas required by the script.

It is either custom built for a specific website or configured to a set of parameters to work with any site.

With a single click, you can easily save the data available on a website to a file on your computer.

In today’s world, robots scrape data for you.

These robots read the HTML code, and retrieve all interesting information that you have previously defined.

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Why use web scraping?

Extracting data from the internet can be done in several different ways, including through APIs.

APIs allow you to use a web service without going through the user interface, simply by coding. The data is often returned as a JSON – structured data.

APIs allow many things such as interconnecting different tools and matching data between them for example.

There are many use cases for APIs.

However, APIs quickly find their limits.

Indeed, developers often face strong limitations in terms of use or even in terms of functionality.

This is where web scraping comes into play and makes sense. Indeed, in most cases, web scraping will allow a developer to use a service, to extract data without any limitation (except very protected site).

For example, thanks to Puppeteer, a developer can automate any task achievable in a web browser.

Now let’s see some examples applicable to web scraping.

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4 use cases for web scraping

1. Scrape data from an e-commerce site

Many companies scrape competing e-commerce sites in search of any changes in prices, product descriptions and images, to get all possible data to drive predictive data analysis and modeling.

Unless pricing is competitive, e-commerce sites can shut down in no time.

Same thing with travel sites that have been extracting prices from airline sites for a long time.

Custom web scraping solutions will help you get all the imaginable data you might need.

This way you can collect data and create your own database.

2. Find data of anyone or any entity

THE web scraping allows to recover any data on an individual X or on a company Y. (especially thanks to social networks)

This data is then used for analysis, comparisons, investment decisions, hiring and more.

Many companies do website scraping today on sites like Le Bon Coin or Indeed for example.

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3. Complex analysis and content curation

Data scraping will also be very useful before launching a website, for example to understand people’s search intent (by scraping the google results pages for example).

The scraper will collect all the results and will be able to know how the sites in your industry communicate for example. So you can line up.

Following this analysis, you can program your robot to fetch content that perfectly matches the needs discovered in the first step.

4. Web scraping to monitor brand reputation

Online reputation is very important today as many businesses depend on word of mouth for their growth.

Here the social media data scraping Or social listeninghelps to understand the current opinion and feelings of a defined audience on a topic.

Once you have listened, you will be able to communicate in the best possible way to perfectly meet the needs of this audience. All based on their true feelings.

In future articles we will teach you how to scrape the web in Node.js simply.

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