"Knowledge is power. Info is liberating." To achieve access to the very best pieces of knowledge, you’re first going to want to gather some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are effective methods that can help you easily compile and store info from websites on the internet.

In this piece we'll examine what's web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and some of the useful use cases for scraping data.

What's web scraping?
Web scraping refers to creating or using a computer software to extract data from complete websites or a number of web pages. Also while you carry out web scraping, you can either download your entire web web page or key points such as the tag or article body content for additional analysis.

What are the benefits of web scraping for business?
Achieve Automation
Sturdy web scrapers allow you to automatically extract data from websites, this allows you or your co-workers to avoid wasting time that will’ve have otherwise been spent on mundane data collection tasks. It also means that you may collect data at higher quantity than a single human may ever hope to achieve.

Additionally it’s attainable so that you can create sophisticated web bots to automate on-line activities with either web scraping software or utilizing a programming language akin to javascript, python, go or php.

Business Intelligence & Insights
Web scraping data from the internet permits you to search for competitor costs, monitor their marketing activity and to swiftly market research your industry online. By downloading, cleaning and analysing data at significant quantity, you’ll be able to build a greater picture of your market, your competitor’s activity which in turn will lead to raised business decision making.

Distinctive and rich datasets
The internet provides you with a rich quantity of text, image, video and numerical data and at present comprises at least 6.05 billion pages. Depending upon what your objective is, you can find relevant websites, setup website crawlers after which make your own custom dataset for analysis.

For example, let’s faux you’re concerned with UK football and wish to understand the sports market in depth.

You would setup webscapers to assemble the next data:

Video Content: To download all the football games from YouTube or Facebook.com.
Football Statistics: You might download your desired workforce’s historical match statistics.
WhoScored – Goal Data.
SoccerStats.
Betting Odds: You possibly can acquire the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s equivalent to Bet365 or from player betting exchanges resembling Betfair or Smarkets.
Create applications for instruments that don’t have a public developer API
By web scraping data, you will never have to depend on the website releasing a public application programming interface (API) to access the data which they show on their webpages. There are a number of benefits to web scraping compared to accessing a public API:

You can access and accumulate any data that is available on their website.
You aren't limited to a particular number of queries.
You don’t must sign up for an API key or must abide by their rules.
Efficient Data Administration
Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you possibly can choose what data you'd like to gather from a range of websites, then you'll be able to accurately accumulate it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling strategies your data shall be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a daily basis.

Storing data with automated software and programs signifies that your organization, operations or staff can spend less time copying and pasting information and more time on artistic work.

What are the disadvantages?
You have to to be taught programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer
In case you are looking to gather and organise a vast quantity of information from the internet, you can find that existing web scraping software is limited in functionality. Though the software will be good for extracting a number of components from a web page, as quickly as you'll want to crawl a number of websites they are less effective.

Therefore you have to to either spend money on learning web scraping strategies in a programming language reminiscent of javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you possibly can hire a contract web scraping developer, regardless both of these approaches will add an overhead to your data assortment operations.

Websites repeatedly change their structure and crawlers require upkeep
As websites usually change their HTML construction, typically your crawlers will break. Whether or not you’re using web scraping software otherwise you’re writing the web scraping code, there's a specific amount of maintenance that needs to be recurrently carried out to keep your data collection pipelines clean and operational.

For every website that you simply write a customized encoding script, adds on a certain amount of technical debt. If numerous websites that you simply’re gathering data from immediately determine to redesign their websites, you'll need to invest in fixing your crawlers.

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