Web Scraping – A trending technique in data science!!!

Web Scraping – A trending technique in data science!!!

Web scraping as a market segment is trending to be an emerging technique in data science to become an integral part of many businesses – sometimes whole companies are formed based on web scraping. Web scraping and extraction of relevant data gives businesses an insight into market trends, competition, potential customers, business performance etc.  Now question is that “what is actually web scraping and where is it used???” Let us explore web scraping, web data extraction, web mining/data mining or screen scraping in details.

What is Web Scraping?

Web Data Scraping is a great technique of extracting unstructured data from the websites and transforming that data into structured data that can be stored and analyzed in a database. Web Scraping is also known as web data extraction, web data scraping, web harvesting or screen scraping.

What you can see on the web that can be extracted. Extracting targeted information from websites assists you to take effective decisions in your business.

Web scraping is a form of data mining. The overall goal of the web scraping process is to extract information from a websites and transform it into an understandable structure like spreadsheets, database or csv. Data like item pricing, stock pricing, different reports, market pricing, product details, business leads can be gathered via web scraping efforts.

There are countless uses and potential scenarios, either business oriented or non-profit. Public institutions, companies and organizations, entrepreneurs, professionals etc. generate an enormous amount of information/data every day.

Uses of Web Scraping:

The following are some of the uses of web scraping:

•     Collect data from real estate listing
•     Collecting retailer sites data on daily basis
•     Extracting offers and discounts from a website.
•     Scraping job posting.
•     Price monitoring with competitors.
•     Gathering leads from online business directories – directory scraping
•     Keywords research
•     Gathering targeted emails for email marketing – email scraping
•     And many more.

There are various techniques used for data gathering as listed below:

•     Human copy-and-paste – takes lot of time to finish when data is huge
•     Programming the Custom Web Scraper as per the needs.
•     Using Web Scraping Softwares available in market.

Are you in search of web data scraping expert or specialist. Then you are at right place. We are the team of web scraping experts who could easily extract data from website and further structure the unstructured useful data to uncover patterns, and help businesses for decision making that helps in increasing sales, cover a wide customer base and ultimately it leads to business towards growth and success.

We have got expertise in all the web scraping techniques, scraping data from ajax enabled complex websites, bypassing CAPTCHAs, forming anonymous http request etc in providing web scraping services.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/web-scraping-trending-technique-in-data-science/

Benefits of Ruby over Python & R for Web Scraping

Benefits of Ruby over Python & R for Web Scraping

In this data driven world, you need to be constantly vigilant, as information and key data for an organization keeps changing all the while. If you get the right data at the right time in an efficient manner, you can stay ahead of competition. Hence, web scraping is an essential way of getting the right data. This data is crucial for many organizations, and scraping technique will help them keep an eye on the data and get the information that will benefit them further.

Web scraping involves both crawling the web for data and extracting the data from the page. There are several languages which programmers prefer for web scraping, the top ones are Ruby, Python & R. Each language has its own pros and cons over the other, but if you want the best results and a smooth flow, Ruby is what you should be looking for.

Ruby is very good at production deployments and using Ruby, Redis & Chef have proven to be a great combination. String manipulation in Ruby is very easy because it is based on Perl syntax. Also, Ruby is great for analyzing web pages using  one of the very powerful gems called Nokogiri. Nokogiri is much easier to use as compared to other packages and libraries used by R and Python respectively. Nokogiri can deal with broken HTML / HTML fragments easily. Ruby also has many extensions, such as Sanitize and Loofah, that can help clean up broken HTML.

Python programmers widely use a library called Beautiful Soup for pulling data out of HTML & XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work. R programmers have a new package called rvest that makes it easy to scrape data from html web pages, by libraries like beautiful soup. It is designed to work with magrittr so that you can express complex operations as elegant pipelines composed of simple, easily understood pieces.

To help you understand it more effectively, below is a comprehensive infographic for the same.

Ruby is far ahead of Python & R for cloud development and deployments.  The Ruby Bundler system is just great for managing and deploying packages from Github. Using Chef, you can start up and tear down nodes on EC2, at will, and monitor for failures,  scale up or down, reset your IP addresses, etc. Ruby also has great testing frameworks like Fakeweb and Capybara, making it almost trivial to build a great suite of unit tests and to include advanced features, like crawling  and scraping using webkit / selenium. 

The only disadvantage to Ruby is lack of machine learning and NLP toolkits, making it much harder to emulate the capacity of a tool like Pattern.  It can still be done, however, since most of the heavy lifting can be done asynchronously using Unix tools like liblinear or vowpal wabbit.

Conclusion

Each language has its plus point and you can pick the one which you are most comfortable with. But if you are looking for smooth web scraping experience, then Ruby is the best option. That has been our choice too for years at PromptCloud for the best web scraping results. If you have any further questions about this, then feel free to get in touch with us.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/benefits-of-ruby-for-web-scraping

How Web Scraping can Help you Detect Weak spots in your Business

How Web Scraping can Help you Detect Weak spots in your Business

Business intelligence is not a new term. Businesses have always been employing experts for analysing the progress, market and industry trends to keep their growth graph going up. Now that we have big data and the tool to gather this data – Web scraping, business intelligence has become even more fruitful. In fact, business intelligence has become a necessary thing to survive now that the competition is fierce in every industry. This is the reason why most enterprises depend on web scraping solutions to gather the data relevant to their businesses. This data is highly insightful and dependable enough to make critical business decisions. Business intelligence from web scraping is definitely a game changer for companies as it can supply relevant and actionable data with minimal effort.

Most businesses have weak spots that are being overlooked or hidden from the plain sight. These weak spots, if left unnoticed can gradually result in the downfall of your company. Here is how you can use data acquired through web scraping to detect weak spots in your business and strengthen them.

Competitor analysis

Many a times, you can find out the flaws in your business by keeping a close watch on your competitors. Competitor analysis is something that we owe to web scraping as the level of competitive intelligence that you can derive from web scraping has never been achievable in the past. With crawling forums and social media sites where your target audience is, you can easily find out if your competitor is leveraging something you have overlooked. Competitor analysis is all about staying updated to each and every action by your competitors, so that you can always be prepared for their next strategic move. If your competitors are doing better than you, this data can be used to make a comparison between your business and theirs which would give you insights on where you lack.

Brand monitoring on Social media

With social media platforms acting like platforms where businesses and customers can interact with each other, the data available on these sites are increasingly becoming relevant to businesses. Any issues in your business operations will also reflect on your customer sentiments. Social media is a goldmine of sentiment data that can help you detect issues within your company. By analysing the posts that mention your brand or product on social media sites, you can identify what department of your company is functioning well and what isn’t.

For example, if you are an Ecommerce portal and many users are complaining about delivery issues from your company on social media, you might want to switch to a better logistics partner who does a better job. The ability to identify such issues at the earliest is extremely important and that’s where web scraping becomes a life saver. With social media scraping, monitoring your brand on social media is easy like never before and the chances of minor issues escalating to bigger ones is almost non-existent. Brand monitoring is extremely crucial if you are a business operating in the online space. Social media scraping solutions are provided by many leading web scraping companies, which totally eliminates the technical complications associated with the process for you.

Finding untapped opportunities

There are always new and untapped markets and opportunities that are relevant to your business. Finding them is not going to be an easy task with manual and outdated methods of research. Web scraping can fill this gap and help you find opportunities that your company can make use of to leverage your reach and progress. Sometimes, targeting the right audience makes all the difference that you’ve been trying to make. By using web crawling to find mentions of your relevant keywords on the web, you can easily stay updated on your niche and fill in to any new untapped markets. Web crawling for keywords is better explained in our previous blog.

Bottom line

It is not a cakewalk to stay ahead in the competition considering how competitive every industry has become in this digital age. It is crucial to find the weak spots and untapped opportunities of your business before someone else does. Of course, you can always use some help from the technology when you need it. Web scraping is clearly the best way to find and gather data that would help you figure these out. With web crawling solutions that can completely take care of this niche process, nothing is stopping you from using the data and insights that the web has in stock for your business.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/web-scraping-detect-weak-spots-business