You need competitive or even predatory strategies to keep up with the competition in today’s market. While some of the publicly available websites offer an API to access their data, you need web scraping technology to extract data from others that don’t offer APIs.
If you’ve stumbled upon this article, you might have thousands of questions about web scraping. Let’s discuss them.
What Is Web Scraping
Web scraping is pulling publicly available data for different purposes such as analyzing market behavior. If you ever have downloaded any piece of information from the internet, you’ve scraped the web. But, typically web scraping is termed to describe automated data collection from the internet.
The general use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, market research, and lead generation. But can be used for anything that you deem fit.
Most data that you extract through web scraping is in HTML format and needs to be structured into a database for analysis. But, many of the sites that are prone to data scraping like Google, limit users to a certain amount of requests to prevent server load.
Most web scraping technology uses two elements in the application. A crawler and a scraper. The crawlers, as the name suggests, crawl through the websites that you request to find the relevant information, and the scraper downloads it.
Websites like Facebook, Reddit, Google, Stackoverflow, allow web scraping in a structured manner. You can’t just go around requesting hundreds of times in a second without getting blocked. But, proxies that forward your connection through different servers let you anonymously scrape website data without getting caught.
If you are a business on a budget constraint but are trying to grow with help of data scraping, residential proxies are the best alternative available. Residential proxies let you surf the websites as a real user from a different location. And they also share the servers with other organizations to offer their services affordably.
How Web Scraping Works
Web scrapers come in different shapes and sizes. If you can code one yourself, that’s ok. But, if not, you can choose applications that come as browser extensions or standalone applications.
Browser extension web scrapers are easy to run but are bound by the functionalities of the browser. Advanced features that are beyond the scope of browsers can’t be run on browser extension scrappers.
Software web scrapers aren’t bound by browser capabilities and can be used for any web scraping jobs that are supported by the application. If you have extensive knowledge of programming, you can build software web scrapers yourself to incorporate the features that you require.
Irrespective of the type of web scraper you choose, you first need to specify URLs associated with your requirement. And then determine the specific set of data that you need to scrape. What the web scraper does is extract all the HTML code from the particular webpage. A basic scrapper may also pull CSS and Javascript codes from the page. Then with predefined filtration methods, it saves the relevant information in a CSV or JSON file.
Why Scrape Data
Data is one of the most valuable components of a successful business in 2022. Let’s see why you’d want to employ data scraping in your business.
Market Research
You must look for customer trends and behavior to run a campaign. Web scraping data helps understand businesses how the customer might react to the new product and how they should proceed in the future.
Price Monitoring
It’s likely that you already have hundreds of competitors in your niche. If you try to keep up with their pricing policy manually, you will end up putting hours of work into monitoring each of them every day. Data scraping helps you monitor and analyze the trend of their pricing by automatically pulling data from their website. With that information, you can design your pricing strategy effectively.
News Report Monitoring
The financial sector is heavily dependent on the news. Have web scrapers keep track of news that drive markets to help analyze risks and trading potentials. If your business is a well-known one and appears in the news frequently, web scraping can be helpful to monitor the news and take action when negative reports appear.
Social Media Analysis
Customers often post their grievances over a product on social media to let others know. While a single report might not hurt your company if all others aren’t supportive of it, if negative feedback is shared enough, it can make your business dysfunctional.
Keep track of your social media mentions with data scraping to catch the faintest of complaints that a genuine customer is having and try to solve the issue. If you keep improving your products, your customer loyalty will increase and more positive feedback will start to appear.
Email Marketing
Most internet users leave their footprints behind. With data scraping, you can pull thousands of emails that you may not be able to collect otherwise. Having enough email addresses is the key to a more successful sales campaign.
How to Learn Web Scraping
Despite having hundreds of web scrapers available online, they might not be the best fit for your purposes. If you’ve decided to build your web scraping software, you need to follow the steps below.
Step 1:
You are better off by starting with Python – a programming language that has hundreds of built-in libraries.
Install Python in your system and learn the basics of it.
Step 2:
Install BeautifulSoup and other necessary frameworks by running the commands:
pip install beautifulsoup
pip install selenium
pip install requests
pip install lxml
pip install html5lib
Read BeautifulSoup documentation to understand the functions better.
Step 3:
When using BeautifulSoup, you will end up extracting all the data from the URL that you mentioned. To locate the data that you need, from your browser go to developer tools and open inspect element.
From there, use filtration techniques to extract the relevant information from the gibberish HTML code.
Step 4:
Save the data in a CSV file for future use.
Follow this link for more information on using BeautifulSoup for web scraping.
Is Web Scraping Illegal
Web scraping is not illegal. But you can get blocked by the domain owners if you do it unethically. They can even sue you for jeopardizing their servers with unethical web scraping techniques. Ethical web scraping strategies that you need to follow are:
- Keep a 12-15 seconds interval between your requests.
- If an API is provided, avoid scraping.
- Follow the terms of services that the site mentions about web scraping.
- Try not to use the information for commercial purposes without the consent of the owners.
The Bottom Line
Web scraping itself is not illegal and can be used to extract data from publicly available websites. But, if you’re willing to use web scraping for your business, follow the terms and conditions that the source mentions.
You can use web scraping software to research the market, monitor the prices, monitor news reports, and keep track of social media mentions.