Data and its collection are now more important than ever. With such massive amounts of data that are available to us, collecting, managing, and organizing them becomes a challenge as it requires time and effort. Thankfully web scraping exists to make our lives easier, and so today, we shall learn about some practical and everyday uses of web scraping and much more!
Before we dive into web scraping, let us first understand what data is.
What is Data?
Data is a form of information that allows information to be transferred between devices. Data can be anything from instructions, directions, descriptions, etc., in formats that are either understood by machines, humans, or both.
Data can be of two kinds, qualitative and quantitive. In today's world, data is everything. Data is wealth, and data is power. With the increasing usage of the internet worldwide, the importance of data has never been higher. Data could be the difference between a competitor crushing its competition or getting crushed by its competition.
Why is Data Scraping or Web Scraping So Essential?
Regardless of what industry you are in, data is necessary everywhere. Data scraping or web scraping is quintessential in Marketing, Finance, Business, E-commerce, and countless other instances.
Humans have limitations and are prone to making mistakes. This is where the importance of Data Scraping or Web Scraping can be realized and felt. Especially when handling vast amounts of data.
When collecting massive amounts of data, it is always important to do it in a way that takes less time, and more importantly, it should be free from mistakes. Data scraping and web scraping eliminates these problems by offering an automated way of collecting data that is both fast and reliable.
How Do You Perform Web Scraping?
Web Scraping can be performed in two main ways:
Manually
Manually web scraping means scraping data or information from the internet by manual means or by humans. This can be used when handling small amounts of data, but it quickly becomes obsolete when handling large amounts of data. This is a prolonged process and is often prone to mistakes and discrepancies, and inconsistencies.
Using Scrapers
This is a significantly more reliable extraction method as it is automated and performed by bots. With the integration of AI and advanced coding, scrapers have become the best option for web scraping as they are fast, efficient, reliable, and consistent. Also, scraping large amounts of data is nearly impossible without the use of scrapers and bots.
What are the Uses of Web Scraping?
Here are some practical uses of Web Scraping:
For Businesses and E-commerce
Web scraping is used by businesses and e-commerce websites to collect data from other websites. This data is then used to make decisions and to improve their business. E-commerce web scraping is essential for improving products, services, and even marketing strategies.
Analyzing Competitors
If you want to study and analyze your competitors, then web scraping is your best option. You can get both real-time data and past information on your competitors and develop a better understanding of them.
Understanding Customer Behavior
Understanding your customer and their behavior is quintessential in business. All successful businesses know about this and are always on the lookout for gaining any and all information they can find on their customers. This information includes their preferences, spending habits, needs, etc.
Marketing
Marketing is a dynamic game. People are always finding new and creative ways to market their businesses, products, and services. With the use of data scraping, any business can see which sort of campaigns and strategies are helpful by studying and observing past and present marketing methods.
Product Analysis
Web Scraping is the most effective way of analyzing product demands, trends, demand, and potential. With the use of web scraping, it is effortless to extract crucial information like product descriptions and pricing.
Price Analysis
Web scraping has made the job of price comparison and analysis very easy and convenient. With web scraping, people can compare and study massive numbers of products simultaneously, easily, and quickly.
Branding
This should be self-explanatory as all aspects of a business can benefit from the use of web scraping directly and indirectly. So branding is no exception, as the role of web scraping in improving branding and its promotion is vital.
Risk Analysis & Prediction
Risk analysis and prediction are only possible by studying data and observing it. Web scraping allows you to collect and compute data on anything. This involves collecting and organizing the data, observing patterns and trends, calculating and making predictions, and forecast possibilities. Furthermore, this can also be used to analyze the feasibility of businesses as well.
For Technology and Research
Machine Learning
The role of data in machine learning is undeniable, as machine learning is impossible without data. The more data you can feed to machine learning, the better, faster, and more accurate it becomes. So the contribution of web scraping here is pretty self-explanatory.
Artificial Intelligence Development
Again another instance that is useless without data. AI or artificial intelligence is dependent on data totally and completely. Without data, it is nearly impossible to train and develop AI and make it usable. Trillions and trillions of bytes of data are fed to AI and used to train and develop them.
SEO
SEO is all about keyword research and auditing, so the application of scraping is pretty apparent here. Scraping allows a quick and effective means of keyword research and trends. Moreover, auditing becomes very easy with the help of data extraction.
Natural Language Processing
Social media sites like blogs and forums are a great source of resources for anyone working with natural language processing. With the help of web scraping, massive amounts of data can be accessed for natural language processing and training AI and bots, as these sites contain a bounty of information from users all over the world.
Miscellaneous
Email
Going through emails is no longer a daunting task, as web scraping allows you to go through countless emails inside a server efficiently and effectively. Human resource departments and social media managers mainly use web scraping here to make their lives easier and achieve a task it would otherwise be nearly impossible to do manually.
Recruiting
Another ingenious use of web scraping, here web scraping helps to narrow down applicants. This helps in decision-making and, yes, expedites the recruitment process. Web scraping helps HR departments to find the best candidates for the job.
Real Estate, Trading, and Stock
All three of these are heavily reliant on data both in real-time and from the past. Real-time data helps determine the current state of the market, while past data helps in analyzing patterns and the flow of the market and allows you to make smarter and more calculated decisions.
Finance
The role of web scraping should be very evident here as finance is all about handling massive amounts of data; that is where web scraping shines and excels! Pun intended!
Background Checking
Web scraping can speed up background checking exponentially, making checking records, medical history, and profiling convenient, fast, and, more importantly, reliable.
Is Web Scraping Legal or Illegal?
The world of web scraping has long been a murky area with a fine dividing line between legal and illegal practices. While scraping is legal in general, web scraping can be deemed illegal in certain circumstances. Scraping websites to harvest publicly available data is not illegal because that information is freely available to everyone.
On the other hand, web scraping can be illegal if it violates a website's TOS and if private data is collected and used without consent. To comply with data privacy laws, we must always abide by and maintain best practices for web scraping.
What are Web Scraping Best Practices?
The following things should be maintained in order to uphold and abide by web scraping best practices:
- Acknowledging the Robot.txt file
- Never make too many requests and overflood a server.
- Refraining from scraping personal information and any information that requires logging in and copyrighted information.
- Checking TOS and TOC of websites
- Utilizing APIs
- Scrape responsibly by avoiding peak hours.
- Using proxies
To Conclude
I hope I have helped you develop a better understanding of the uses and applications of web scraping. It is, without a doubt, such a helpful resource and has such creative and intelligent applications that it is truly fascinating. Hopefully, as we develop more, more advanced methods of scraping are indeed on the way. All that is left to do is wait patiently!
Happy Web Scraping and don't forget to check out our web scraping services if you need help with your web scraping projects 👨🔧