What is Web Scraping? Use cases of web scraping

web scraping, web crawler, process of web scraping, use cases of web scraping, Is web scraping legal?

INTRODUCTION TO WEB SCRAPING

Web scraping is an automated process of extracting content and available web data from targeted websites. Instead of gathering data manually, web scraping tools are used to acquire a vast amount of information automatically, which makes the process much faster. The key feature of web scraping is it eliminates the need for manually downloading or copying any data. Most of this data is unstructured in an HTML format which is then converted into structured data in a spreadsheet or a database.

Web scraping also labeled as data scraping or web data extraction or screen scraping or web harvesting is the process of automating data extraction in an efficient and fast way.

In the real world workplace as a web scraping specialist, you will need to design and develop scalable, fast, and robust data management systems. You will need to work closely with data science professionals and machine learning experts to assist both client-facing as well as internal projects.

The Basics of Web Scraping

Web scraping is a technique that comprises two parts:

·       Web crawler

·       Web scraper

Web Crawler

A web crawler is an internet bot and is more popularly known as a web spider or automatic indexer or web robot. A spider is an AI-driven tool that browses the internet to search particular data at lightning speed. It performs functions like updating its web content, copies all the visited pages for subsequent processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide lightning-fast searches, automate maintenance tasks on a website.

E.g. Heritrix, Apache Nutch, HTTrack, etc.

Web Scraper

A web scraper is a highly specialized tool created to precisely extract the data from web pages. Depending on the project at hand a web scraper varies in both design and complexity. The data locators or selectors are the major components of every scraper. Data locators use the HTML file to find the required data. Normally CSS selectors, REGEX, XPATH, or a combination of these is applied.

The Web Scraping Process

The web scraping process involves three main steps are as follows:

Step one: Retrieve content from the targeted website by using web scraping tools (also called web scrapers) to make HTTP requests to the specific URLs. Depending on your goals, experience, and budget, you can either buy a web scraping service or acquire the tools that can help you create a web scraper yourself. The content you request is returned from the web servers in HTML format.

Step two: Extract required data from the content. The specific information you need from the HTML is parsed by web scrapers according to your requirements.

Step three: Storing parsed data. The data needs to be stored in CSV, JSON formats, or in any database for further use.

When you are dealing with the data at scale there are quite a few challenges some of these include maintaining the web scraper even if the website layout changes, executing JavaScript, managing proxies, and working around anti-bots. As a web scraping specialist, you will be trained to work around these deeply technical problems.

Why web scraping is used?

1.    Scraping data from yellow pages data and other online directories to generate leads.

2.    Scraping data of professionals in a specific field on LinkedIn for job recruitment.

3.    Scraping sports statistics for fantasy or betting leagues.

4.    Scraping product details on different e-commerce sites for comparison shopping.

5.    Scraping data for academic or marketing research.

6.    Scraping share prices of individual stocks into an App API.

7.    Scraping reviews of hotels on travel websites.

8.    Scraping financial data of companies for market research and insights.

9.    Scraping data for competitor analysis.

10. Scraping real estate websites for property listings.

Some of the most common web scraping use cases

Businesses use it for various purposes, such as market research, brand protection, travel fare aggregation, price monitoring, SEO monitoring, and review monitoring.

Market Research

Web scraping is broadly used for market research. To stay competitive, companies need to know their market and analyze competitors’ data.

Brand Protection

Web scraping is crucial for brand protection because web scraping allows gathering data all over the web. Make sure that there are no violations in terms of brand security.

Travel fare aggregation

Travel companies use web scraping for travel fare aggregation. With the help of web scrapers, they search for deals across multiple websites and publish the results on their websites.

Price Monitoring

Web scraping can also be helpful when it comes to price monitoring. Since businesses need to keep up with the ever-changing prices in the market, scraping prices is vital to make accurate pricing strategies.

SEO Monitoring

Web scraping allows companies to conduct SEO monitoring to track their results and progress in the rankings.

Review Monitoring

Web scraping can be used for review monitoring to track customer reviews and achieve marketing goals.

Store Locators

Scraping store locators to populate a list of business locations in a database.

Ecommerce Sites

Scraping a list of product data, names, and prices from sites like Amazon, Flipkart, or eBay for competitor analysis.

Sports

Web scraping for sports scores to update you on the latest score or for the game statistics.

Common python libraries used for web scraping

·       Beautiful Soup

·       lxml

·       Mechanical Soup

·       Requests

·       ScraPy

·       Selenium

·       Urllib

Is Web Scraping legal?

As web scraping is gaining more popularity. It is important to comply with all other laws and regulations regarding the source targets or data itself. Some websites allow web scrapers and some don’t. You know web scraping of a website by looking at the website’s “robots.txt” file.

Here you should consider some of the examples of web scraping probably illegal:

1. Scraping data that requires logging in to be reached.

They are not allowed to log in to the website and then download data.

2. Scraping creative works.

You have to make sure that you are not breaching laws that may apply to copyrighted data, such as designs, layouts, articles, videos, and everything that can be considered creative work.

Also, you have to consider all the possible risks if web scraping carelessly, such as getting blocked, for example. That’s why it is important to web scrape with a trusted service provider.