Google Sheets vs Web Scraping Services

Google Sheets vs Web Scraping Services

Ever since the data on the web started multiplying in terms of quantity and quality, people have sought out ways to scrape or extract this data for a wide range of applications. Since the scope of extraction was limited back then, the extraction methods mostly comprised of manual methods like copy-pasting text into a local document.

As businesses realized the importance of web scraping as a big data acquisition channel, new technologies and tools surfaced with advanced capabilities to make web scraping easier and efficient.

Today, there are various solutions catering to the web data extraction requirements of companies; DIY tools to managed web scraping services are out there and you can choose one that suits your requirements the best.

Scraping using Google sheets

As we mentioned earlier, there are so many different ways to extract data from the web although not all of these would make sense from a business point of view. You can even use Google docs to extract data from a simple HTML page if you are looking to understand the basics of web scraping. You could check out our guide on using google sheets to scrape a website if you want to learn something that might come handy.

However, Google docs and other web data extraction tools come with their own limitations. For starters, tools aren’t meant for large-scale extraction which is what most businesses will require. Unless you are a hobbyist looking to extract a few web pages for tinkering with a new data visualization tool, you should steer clear from web scraping tools. Scraping tools cannot cater to the requirements of a business as it could be well out of their capabilities.

Enterprise-grade web data extraction

Web scraping is only a common term for the process of saving data from a web page to a local storage or cloud. However, if we consider the practical applications of the data, it’s obvious that there’s a clear distinction between mere web scraping and enterprise-grade web data extraction.

The latter is more inclined towards the extraction of data from the web for real-world applications and hence requires advanced solutions that are built for the same. Following are some of the qualities that an enterprise-grade web scraping solution should have:

- High-end customization options
- Complete automation
- Post-processing options to make the data machine-ready
- Technology to handle dynamic websites
- Capability of handling large-scale extraction

Why DaaS is the best solution for enterprise-grade web scraping

When it comes to extracting data for business use cases, there should be a stark difference in the way things are done. The speed and efficiency matters more in the business world and this demands a managed web scraping solution that takes the complexities and pain points out of the process to provide companies with just the data they need, the way they need it.

Data as a Service is exactly what businesses that are looking to extract web data without losing focus on their core business operations need. Web crawling companies like PromptCloud, that work on the DaaS model does all the heavy lifting associated with extracting web data and deliver only the needed data to the companies in a ready-to-use format.

Source:-https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/google-sheets-vs-web-scraping-services

Scraping Dynamic Websites: How We Tackle the Problem

Scraping Dynamic Websites: How We Tackle the Problem

Acquiring data from the web for business applications has already gained popularity if we look at the sheer number of use cases. Companies have realized the value addition provided by data and are looking for better and efficient ways of data extraction. However, web scraping is a niche technical process that takes years to master given the dynamic nature of the web. Since every website is different and custom coded, it’s not possible to write a single program that can handle multiple websites. The web scraping setup should be coded separately for each target site and this needs a team of skilled programmers.

Web scraping is without doubt a complex trade; however if the target site in question employs dynamic coding practices, this complexity is further multiplied. Over the years, we have understood the technical nuances of web scraping and perfected our modus operandi to to scrape dynamic websites with high accuracy and efficiency. Here are some ways how we tackle the challenge of scraping dynamic websites.

1. Proxies

Some websites have different Geo/Device/OS/browser specific versions that they serve depending on the variables. This could give a great deal of confusion to the crawlers especially while figuring out how to extract the right version. This will need some manual work in terms of finding the different versions provided by the site and configuring proxies to fetch the right version as per the requirement. For geo-specific versions, the crawler is simply deployed on a server from where the required version of the site is accessible.

2. Browser automation

When it comes to websites that use very complex and dynamic code, it’s better have all the page content rendered using a browser first. Selenium can be used for browser automation which will help us do the scraping. It is essentially a handy toolkit that can drive the browser from your favorite programming language. Although it’s primarily used for testing, it can be used for scraping dynamic web pages. It can be used to control a web browser, which is how scraping using selenium is typically done. In this case, the browser first renders the page which will help overcome the problem of reverse engineering JavaScript code to fetch the page content. Once the page content is rendered, it is saved locally to scrape the required data points later. Although this is comparatively easy, there is a high chance of encountering errors while scraping using the browser automation method.

3. Handling POST requests

Many web pages will only display the data that we need after receiving a certain input from the user. Let’s say you are looking for used cars data from a particular geo-location on a classified site. The website would first require you to enter the ZIP code of the location from where you need listings from. This ZIP code must be sent to the website as a post request while scraping. We craft the post request using the appropriate parameters so as to reach the target page that contains all the data points to be scraped.

4. Manufacturing the JSON URL

There are dynamic web pages that use AJAX calls to load and refresh the page content. These are particularly difficult to scrape and extract data from as the triggers that make up the JSON file is difficult to trace. This requires a lot of manual inspection and testing, but once the appropriate parameters are identified, a JSON file that would fetch the target page which includes the desired data points can be manufactured. This JSON file is often tweaked automatically for navigation or fetching varying data points. Manufacturing the JSON URL with apt parameters is the primary pain point with web pages that use AJAX calls.
Bottom-line

Scraping dynamic web pages is extremely complicated and demands deep expertise in the field of web scraping. It also demands an extensive tech stack and well-built infrastructure that can handle the complexities associated with web data extraction. With our years of expertise and well-evolved web scraping infrastructure, we cater to data requirements where dynamic web pages are involved on a daily basis.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/scraping-dynamic-websites-web-scraping

Web Scraping using Chrome Scraper Extension

Do you want to get data from a web page or website to CSV or Excel Spreadsheet? The answer is web scraping. There are number of web scraping software and services available in the market like Visual Web Ripper, Mozenda, Kimono Labs, Outwit Hub, ScraperWiki and Automation Anywhere etc. for web data extraction. These all tools and services are paid and not easy to use for non-technical persons. Now I am going to discuss another method of doing web scraping that is easy to use and free.  There are various Google Chrome browser extensions available at Google Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps) using that we can do screen scraping/web scraping.

1. Web scraper
Official Website: http://www.webscraper.io

Install it by visiting following link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd

Web Scraper is a chrome extension for scraping data out of web pages to Excel Spreadsheet or database. It allows you to create a plan/sitemap. According to that plan/sitemap a website is traversed and the data is extracted. The extracted data can be exported to CSV or stored in CouchDB. It also supports scraping from multiple pages with pagination. You can use Web Scraper for scraping multiple types of data like text, tables, images, links and more. It also supports web data extraction from dynamic web pages built up with modern web technologies like JavaScript and AJAX.

2. Data Miner
Install DataMiner by visiting following link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dataminer/nndknepjnldbdbepjfgmncbggmopgden

DataMiner is a standalone chrome browser plugin for extracting data from the websites. Later on extracted data can be exported to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets.

Using DataMiner extension, you can scrape data from tables and lists on the websites and easily export them into CSV file or Microsoft Excel. It also supports XPath selectors. You can use it for scraping emails, Google search results, HTML tables etc.



3. Screen Scraper:
Install it by visiting following link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/screenscraper/pfegffhjcgkneoemnlniggnhkfioidjg

Screen Scraper is another chrome scraper as it name suggest is a Chrome browser extension/plugin for screen scraping. Screen scraping is the process of automatically scraping/extracting information from websites. Later on, Scraped information can be downloaded as a CSV file or JSON file. It supports Element Selectors and Xpath Selectors method.

4. iMacro
Official Website of iMacro: http://imacros.net/

Install iMacro it by visiting following link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imacros-for-chrome/cplklnmnlbnpmjogncfgfijoopmnlemp?hl=en

iMacro is a macro recorder for your Google Chrome browser. Macro recorder is a piece of tool that records user actions. It allows users to record repetitious tasks on the web and replay it at later time. It is useful tool for web automation, data extraction and web testing. Using iMacros you can remember passwords, fill out web forms, download files and possibilities are endless. iMacros is useful to Web developers for web regression testing, performance testing and web transaction monitoring. To use iMacros you just need to record the task once and save it in your machine next time when you need to perform the same task you need not repeat the same task again and again. iMacro plugin comes for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer too.

Source url :-http://webdata-scraping.com/web-scraping-using-chrome-scraper-extension/

A guide to data scraping

Data is all the rage these days.

It’s what businesses are utilizing to create an unfair advantage with their customers. The more data you acquire, the easier it becomes to slice it up in a unique way to solve problems for your customers.

But knowing that data can benefit you – and actually getting the data – are two separate items.
Much like technology, data can catapult you to greater heights, or it can bring you to your knees.
That’s why it is essential to pay careful attention and ensure the data you use propels you forward versus holding you back.

Why all data isn’t created equal

The right data can make you a hero. It can keep you at the forefront of your industry, allowing you to use the insights the information uncovers to make better decisions.

Symphony Analytics uses a myriad of patient data from a variety of sources to develop predictive models, enabling them to tailor medication schedules for different patient populations.

Conversely, the wrong data can sink you. It can cause you to take courses of action that just aren’t right. And, if you take enough wrong action based upon wrong data, your credibility and reputation could suffer a blow that’s difficult to recover from.

For instance, one report from the state of California auditor’s office shows that accounting records were off by more than $6 million due to flawed data.

That’s no good. And totally avoidable.

As a result, it is critical you invest the energy in advance to ensure the data you source will make you shine, rather than shrink.
How to get good data

You’ve got to plan for it. You’ve got to be clear about your business objectives, and then you’ve got to find a way to source the information in a consistent and reliable manner.

If your business’ area of expertise is data capture and analysis, then gathering the information you need on your own could be a viable option.

But, if the strength of you and your team isn’t in this specialized area, then it’s best to leave it to the professionals.

That’s why brands performing market research on a larger scale often hire market research firms to administer the surveys, moderate focus groups or conduct one-on-one interviews.

Of late, more companies are turning to data scraping as a means to capture the quantitative information they need to fuel their businesses. And they frequently turn to third-party companies to supply them with the information they need.

While doing so allows them to focus on their core businesses, relinquishing control of a critical asset for their businesses can be a little nerve-racking.

But, it doesn’t have to be. That is if you work with the right data scraping partner.

How to choose the right data scraping partner for you
In the project management world, there’s a triangle that is often used to help prioritize what is most important to you when completing a task.

Data Scraping Group: Good, Fast, Cheap - Pick any two

Although you may want all three choices, you can only pick two.

If you want something done fast, and of good quality, know that it won’t be cheap. If you want it fast and cheap, be aware that you will sacrifice quality. And if you’d like it to be cheap and good, prepare to wait a bit, because speed is a characteristic that will fall off the table.

There are many 3rd party professionals who can offer data scraping services for you. As you begin to evaluate them, it will be helpful to keep this triangle in mind.
Here are six considerations when exploring a partner to work with to ensure you get high-quality
web crawling and data extraction.

1. How does the data fit into your business model?

This one is counter intuitive, but it’s a biggie. And, it plays a major role as you evaluate all the other considerations.

If the data you are receiving is critical to your operations, then obtaining high-quality information exactly when you need it is non-negotiable. Going back to the triangle, “good” has to be one of your two priorities.

For instance, if you’re a daily deal site, and you rely on a third party to provide you all the data for the deals, then having screw-ups with your records just can’t happen.
That would be like a hospital not staffing doctors for the night. It just doesn’t work.
But, if the data you need isn’t mission critical for you to run your business, you may have a little more leeway in terms of how you weight the other factors that go into choosing who best to work with.

2. Cost

A common method numerous businesses use to evaluate costs is just to evaluate vendors based on the prices they quote.

And, too often, companies let the price ranges of the service providers dictate how much they are willing to pay.

A smarter option is to determine your budget in advance … before you even go out to explore who can get you the data you need. Specifically, you should decide how much you are able and willing to pay for the information you want. Those are two different issues.
Most businesses don’t enjoy unlimited budgets. And, even when the information being sourced is critical to operating the business, there is still a ceiling for what you’re able to pay.
This will help you start operating from a position of strength, rather than reacting to the quotes you may receive.

Another thing to consider are the various types of fees. Some companies charge a setup fee, followed by a subsequent monthly fee. Others charge fixed costs. If you’re looking at multiple quotes from vendors, this could make it difficult for you to compare.
A wise way to approach this is to make sure you are clear on what the total cost would be for the project, for whatever specified time period you’d like to contract with someone.
Here are a few questions to ask to make sure you get a full view of the costs and fees in the estimate:

-Is there a setup fee?
-What are the fixed costs associated with this project?
-What are the variable costs, and how are they calculated?
-Are there any other taxes, fees, or things that I could be charged for that are not listed on this quote?
-What are the payment terms?

3. Communication

Even when you’ve got a foolproof system that runs like a well-oiled machine, you still need to interact with your vendors on a regular basis. Ongoing communication confirms things are operating the way you’d like, gives you an opportunity to discuss possible changes and ensures your partner has a firm understanding of your business needs.

The data you are sourcing is important to you and your business. You need to partner with someone who will be receptive to answering questions and responding in a timely manner to inquiries you have.

4. Reputation

This was mentioned before, but it’s worth repeating. All data is not created equal. And, if you are utilizing data as a means to build and grow your business, you need to make sure it’s good.

So, even though data scraping isn’t your area of expertise, it will greatly benefit you to spend time validating the reputation the people vying to deliver it to you.

How do they bake quality in their work? Do they have any certifications or other forms of proof to give you further confidence in their capabilities? Have their previous customers been pleased with the quality of the data they’ve delivered?

You could do so by checking reviews of previous customers to see how pleased they were and why. This method is also helpful because it may assist you in identifying other important criteria that may not have been on your radar.

You could also compare the credentials of each of the vendors, and the teams who will actually be working on your project.

Another highly-effective way could be to simply spend time talking to your potential partners and have them explain to you their processes. While you may not understand all the lingo, you could ask them a few questions about how they engage in quality control and see how they respond.

You’d probably be shocked at the range of answers you get.

Here are a few questions to guide you as you start asking questions about their quality system:

- Are the data spiders customized for the websites you want information from?
- What mechanisms are in place to verify the harvested data is correct?
- How is the performance of the data spiders monitored to verify they haven’t failed?
- How is the data backed up? Is redundancy built into the process so that information is not lost?
- Is internet access high-speed, and how frequently is it monitored?

5. Speed

For those suppliers that are able to deliver data to you fast, make sure you understand why they are able to deliver at such a rapid speed. Are there special systems they have in place that enable them to do so? Or perhaps, is there any level of quality that is sacrificed as a result of getting you information fast.

Often when contracting with a data extraction partner, they’ll deliver your information on a set schedule that you both agree upon.

But, there may be times when you need information outside of your normal schedule, and you may even need it on a brief timeline.

Knowing in advance how quickly your partner is able to turn around a request will help you better prepare project lead times.

6. Scalability

The needs of your business change over time. And, as you work to grow, it is quite possible the data needs of your company will expand as well.

So, it’s helpful to know your data scraping partner is able to grow with you. It would be great to know that as the volume, and perhaps the speed of the information you need to run your business increases, the company providing it is able to keep pace.

Don’t get stuck with bad data
It could spell disaster for your business. So, make sure you do your due diligence to fully vet the companies you’re considering sourcing your data from.
Make a list of requirements in advance and rank them, if necessary, in order of importance to you.
That way, as you begin to evaluate proposals and capabilities, you’ll be in a position to make an informed decision.
You need good data. Your customers need you to have good data, too.
Make sure you work with someone who can give it to you.

Source url :-http://www.data-scraping.com.au/techniques-for-high-quality-web-crawling-and-data-extraction

How Data Scraping Help Businesses?

Gathering data from diverse internet sources like website and others, the process is called as data scraping. Around the globe such and many describe data scraping as web scraping, data harvesting. Now days the competition is very high in every business and for that the companies required to collect more useful data for their business. 

Research market trends and extracting different types of data is necessary today’s. Data scraping is one of the latest technology that collect diverse data from internet source and make use in the analysis.

By using data scraping any one can quickly classify the any kind of information and also make decision and marketing strategies. Reducing risk and also improving business profit are other advantages of data scraping. Scraping data from website by manually and also using data scraper, website scraper and website data scraper tools.

Now you want to get data scraping solutions for your business?The company offers lowest industry rate data scraping, web data scraping and website data scraping services as the need of clients with never compromise on quality and fast turn around time. For further details about the company send query at info@www.web-scraping-services.com.


Source Url : -http://3idatascraping.weebly.com/blog/how-data-scraping-help-businesses

How We Maintain Data Quality While Handling Large Scale Extraction

How We Maintain Data Quality While Handling Large Scale Extraction

The demand for high quality data is increasing along with the rise in products and services that require data to run. Although the information available on the web is increasing in terms of quantity and quality, extracting it in a clean, usable format remains challenging to most businesses. Having been in the web data extraction business for long enough, we have come to identify the best practices and tactics that would ensure high quality data from the web.

At PromptCloud, we not only make sure data is accessible to everyone, we make sure it’s of high quality, clean and delivered in a structured format. Here is how we maintain the quality while handling zettabytes of data for hundreds of clients from across the world.

Manual QA process

1. Crawler review

Every web data extraction project starts with the crawler setup. Here, the quality of the crawler code and its stability is of high priority as this will have a direct impact on the data quality. The crawlers are programmed by our tech team members who have high technical acumen and experience. Once the crawler is made, two peers review the code to make sure that the optimal approach is used for extraction and to ensure there are no inherent issues with the code. Once this is done, the crawler is deployed on our dedicated servers.

2. Data review

The initial set of data starts coming in when the crawler is run for the first time. This data is manually inspected, first by the tech team and then by one of our business representatives before the setup is finalized. This manual layer of quality check is thorough and weeds out any possible issues with the crawler or the interaction between the crawler and website. If issues are found, the crawler is tweaked to eliminate them completely before the setup is marked complete.

Automated monitoring

Websites get updated over time, quite frequently than you’d imagine. Some of these changes could break the crawler or cause it to start extracting the wrong data. This is why we have developed a fully automated monitoring system to watch over all the crawling jobs happening on our servers. This monitoring system continuously checks the incoming data for inconsistencies and errors. There are three types of issues it can look for:

1. Data validation errors

Every data point has a defined value type. For example, the data point ‘Price’ will always have a numerical value and not text. In cases of website changes, there can be class name mismatches that might cause the crawler to extract wrong data for a certain field. The monitoring system will check if all the data points are in line with their respective value types. If an inconsistency is found, the system immediately sends out a notification to the team members handling that project and the issue is fixed promptly.

2. Volume based inconsistencies

There can be cases where the volume count for records significantly drop or increase in an irregular fashion. This is a red sign as far as web crawling goes. The monitoring system will already have the expected record count for different projects. If inconsistencies are spotted in the data volumes, the system sends out a prompt notification.

3. Site changes

Structural changes happening to the target websites is the main reason why crawlers break. This is monitored by our dedicated monitoring system, quite aggressively. The tool performs frequent checks on the target site to make sure nothing has changed since the previous crawl. If changes are found, it sends out notifications for the same.
High end servers

It is understood that web crawling is a resource-intensive process that needs high performance servers. The quality of servers will determine how smooth the crawling happens and this in turn has an impact on the quality of data. Having firsthand experience in this, we use high-end servers to deploy and run our crawlers. This helps us avoid instances where crawlers fail due to the heavy load on servers.

Data cleansing

The initially crawled data might have unnecessary elements like HTML tags. In that sense, this data can be called crude. Our cleansing system does an exceptionally good job at eliminating these elements and cleaning up the data thoroughly. The output is clean data without any of the unwanted elements.

Structuring

Structuring is what makes the data compatible with databases and analytics systems by giving it a proper, machine readable syntax. This is the final process before delivering the data to the clients. With structuring done, the data is ready to be consumed either by importing it to a database or plugging to an analytics system. We deliver the data in multiple formats – XML, JSON and CSV which also adds to the convenience of handling it.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-we-maintain-data-quality-web-data-extraction

Applications of Web Data Extraction in Ecommerce

web data mining ecommerceWe all know the importance of data generated by an organisation and its application in improvement of product strategy, customer retention, marketing, business development and more. With the advent of digital age and increase in storage capacity, we have come to a point where the internal data generated by an organisation has become synonymous with Big Data. But, we must understand that by focusing only on the internal data, we are losing out another another crucial source – the web data.

Pricing Strategy

This is one of the most common use cases in Ecommerce. It’s important to correctly price the products in order to get the best margins and that requires continuous evaluation and remodeling of pricing strategy. The very first approach takes into account market condition, consumer behavior, inventory and a lot more. It’s highly probable that you’re already implementing such type of pricing strategy by leveraging your organisational data. That said, it’s also equally important to consider the pricing set by the competitors for similar products as consumers can be price sensitive.

We provide data feeds consisting of product name, type, variant, pricing and more from Ecommerce websites. You can get this structured data according to your preferred format (CSV/XML/JSON) from your competitors’s websites to perform further analysis. Just feed the data into the analytics tool and you are ready to factor in the competitors’ pricing into your pricing strategy. This will answer some the important questions such as: Which product can attract premium price? Where can we give discount without incurring loss? You can also go one step further by using our live crawling solution to implement a robust dynamic (real-time) pricing strategy. Apart from this, you can use the data feed to understand and monitor competitors’ product catalog.

Reseller management

There are many manufacturers who sell via resellers and generally there are terms that restrict the resellers from selling the products on the same set of Ecommerce sites. This ensures that the seller is not competing with others to sell own product. But, it’s practically impossible to manually search the sites to find the resellers who are infringing the terms. Apart from that, there might be some unauthorized sellers selling your product on various sites.
Web data extraction services can automate the data collection process so that you’ll be able to search products and their sellers with less time and efficiently. After that your legal department can take the further action according to the situation.

Demand analysis

Demand analysis is a crucial component for planning and shipping products. It answers important questions such as: Which product will move fast? Which one will be slower? To start off, e-commerce stores can analyze own sales figures to estimate the demand, but it’s always recommended that planning must be done much before the launch. That way you won’t be planning after the customers land on your site; you’d be ready with right number of products to meet the demand.
One great place to get a solid idea of demand is online classified site. Web crawling can be deployed to monitor the most in-demand products, categories and the listing rate. You can also look at the pattern according to different geographical locations. Finally, this data can be used to prioritize the sales of products in different categories as per region-specific demand.

Search Ranking on marketplaces

Many Ecommerce players sell their product on their own website along with marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. These popular marketplaces attract a huge number of consumers and sellers. The sheer volume of sellers on these platforms makes it difficult to compete and rank high for particular search performed on these sites. Search ranking in these marketplaces depends on multiple factors (title, description, brand, images, conversion rate, etc.) and needs continuous optimization. Hence, monitoring ranking for preferred keywords for the specific products via web data extraction can be helpful in measuring the result of optimization efforts.

Campaign monitoring

Many brands are engaging with consumers via different platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. Consumers are also increasingly turning towards various forums to express their views. It has become imperative for businesses to monitor, listen and act on what consumers say. You need to move beyond number of retweets, likes, views, etc. and look at how exactly consumers perceived your messages.
This can be done by crawling forums and sites like YouTube and Twitter to extract all the comments related to your brand and your competitors’ brand. Further analysis can be done by performing sentiment analysis. This will give you additional idea for future campaigns and help you optimize product strategy along with customer support strategy.

Takeaway

We covered some of the practical use cases of web data mining in the e-commerce domain. Now it’s up to you to leverage the web data to ensure growth of your retail store. That said, crawling and extracting data from the web can be technically challenging and resource intensive. You need a strong tech team with domain expertise, data infrastructure and monitoring setup (in case of website structure changes) to ensure steady flow of data. At this point it won’t be out of context to mention that some of our clients had tried to do this in-house and came to us when the results didn’t meet expectation. Hence, it is recommended that you should go with a dedicated Data as a Service provider who can deliver data from any number of sites according to pre-specified format at desired frequency. PromptCloud takes care of end to end data acquisition pipeline and ensures high quality data delivery without interruption. Check out our detailed post of on things to consider when evaluating options for web data extraction.

Source Url:-https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/applications-of-web-data-extraction-in-ecommerce/

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.

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

Tips For Data Scrapping in PDF File

Tips For Data Scrapping in PDF File

What is the Data Scrapping?

End data, a method or a procedure in which material is extracted from the text refers to a document. A person using this process can remove material from a PDF file format.

Those involved in commercial activities may fall short on data disposal. It is a process in which data or information can be extracted from the Portable Document Format file. They have tools that automatically format data that different provisions may be found on the Internet are easy to use. These advanced tools to the needs of users can gather information. Users do just words or phrases and all related equipment, Portable Document Format file that will extract the necessary information available to enter. It is widely used to collect information from an editable format.

Portable Document Format files are a major asset to protect the originality of the documents you convert from Word to PDF data. Algorithms the image file compression file sizes are due to heavy graphics or content are less. A portable Data Scrapping document format or to fix any software, hardware independent. File encryption enhances the security of its content allows.

How data from a PDF file, you can scrap?

A portable document format that an application for exchange or transfer data over the content or the platform can be used. Part of storing large amounts of data as a simple tool can use this program. Easy and rapid application materials in a portable document format can handle. The computer program that more or stored in a Portable Document Format file is a variety of data extracted.

Valuable content in a particular file can remove a non-editable. An application containing a PDF document can make large amounts of valuable information. This technique of sampling equipment reports, theses, presentations, projects, manuals and other documents those are useful to prepare.

Information out to eliminate important data in the format support. Easily extracted from a person can keep the formatting of the data intact and secure. You and PDF documents on a variety of subjects to make a number of Word may be for information purposes. A scene from a non-editable file can delete content or images. Therefore, with text and graphics can be extracted.

A Portable Document Format is an application that is used for a variety of reasons. A personal password, certificates and digital signatures can encrypt files using. It is portable and compatible format that allows you to transfer your files in Portable Document Format is applied. The request to use the information for a variety of reports can be prepared properly.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/business-articles/outsourcing-articles/tips-data-scrapping-pdf-file-492673.html#ixzz4hmydaqhY

Web Data and Web Scraping

Web Data and Web Scraping

You can get web data through a process called web scraping. Since websites are created in a human readable format, software can’t meaningfully analyze this information. While you could manually (read: the time-consuming route) input this data into a format more palatable to programs, web scraping automates this process and eliminates the possibility of human error.

How You Can Use Web Data

If you’re new to the world of web data or looking for creative ways to channel this resource, here are three real world examples of entrepreneurs who use scraped data to accelerate their startups.
Web Data for Price Monitoring

The key to staying ahead of your competitors online is to have excellent online visibility, which is why we invest so much in paid advertising (Google Adwords). But it occurred to me that if you aren’t offering competitive prices, then you’re essentially throwing money down the drain. Even if you have good visibility, users will look elsewhere to buy once they’ve seen your prices.

Although I used to spend hours scrolling through competitor sites to make sure that I was matching all of their prices, it took far too long and probably wasn’t the best use of my time. So instead, I started scraping websites and exporting the pricing information into easily readable spreadsheets.

This saves me huge amounts of time, but also saves my copywriter time as they don’t have to do as much research. We usually outsource the scraping, as we don’t really trust ourselves to do it properly! The most important aspect of this process is having the data in an easily readable format. Spreadsheets are great, but even they can become too muddled up with unnecessary information.

Enriched Web Data for Lead Generation

We use a variety of different sources and data to get our clients more leads and sales. This is really beneficial to our clients that include national and international brands who all use this information to specifically target an audience, boost conversions, increase engagement and/or reduce customer acquisition costs.

Web data can help you know which age groups, genders, locations, and devices convert the best. If you have existing analytics already in place, you can enrich this data with data from around the web, like reviews and social media profiles, to get a more complete picture. You’ll be able to use this enriched web data to tailor your website and your brand’s message so that it instantly connects to who your target customer is.

For example, by using these techniques, we estimate that our client Super Area Rugs will increase their annual revenue by $450,000.

Web Data for Competitor Monitoring

The coupon business probably seems docile from the outside but the reality is that many sites are backed by tens of millions of dollars in venture capital and there are only so many offers to go around. That means exclusive deals can easily get poached by competitors. So we use scraping to monitor our competition to ensure they’re not stealing coupons from our community and reposting them elsewhere.

Both the IT and Legal departments use this data–in IT, we use it more functionally, of course. Legal uses it as research before moving ahead with cease and desist orders.

And there you have it. Real use cases of web data helping companies with competitive pricing, competitor monitoring, and increasing conversion for sales. Keep in mind that it’s not just about having the web data, it’s also about quality and using a reputable company to provide you with the information you need to increase your revenue.

Source:https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2016/11/10/how-you-can-use-web-data-to-accelerate-your-startup/

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services

The aim of the data mining process is to collect the information from reliable online sources as per the requirement of the customer and convert it to a structured format for the further use. The major source of data mining is any of the internet search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN etc. Many search engines such as Google and Bing provide customized results based on the user’s activity history. Based on our keyword search, the search engine lists the details of the websites from where we can gather the details as per our requirement.

Collect the data from the online sources such as Company Name, Contact Person, Profile of the Company, Contact Phone Number of Email ID Etc. are doing for the marketing activities. Once the data is gathered from the online sources into a structured format, the marketing authorities will start their marketing promotions by calling or emailing the concerned persons, which may result to create a new customer. So basically data mining is playing a vital role in today’s business expansions. By outsourcing the data entry and its related works, you can save the cost that would be incurred in setting up the necessary infrastructure and employee cost.

Source:https://www.isnare.com/?aid=1839547&ca=Internet

Understanding URL scraping

Understanding URL scraping

URL scraping is the process where you automatically extract and filter URLs of WebPages that have specific features. The features that you are looking for vary depending on your goal. For example, if you are looking for a site where you can place your comment and get back link juice, you should go for WebPages that allow dofollow comments.

Techniques for URL scraping

There are many techniques that you can use to get the URL that you are looking for. Some of these techniques include:

Copy pasting: this is where you visit a given site and check whether it has the features that you are looking for. For example, if you are interested in dofollow links, you should visit a number of sites and find out if they have your target links. You should then identify the ones that have the features that you are looking for and compile a list.

Text grepping: this is a technique that allows you to search plain text on websites that match a regular expression. Although, the technique was designed for Unix, you can also use it on other operating systems.

HTTP programming: here you retrieve the WebPages that have the features that you are looking for. You should then note the URL of the pages. To retrieve the pages you have to post HTTP requests using a remote server that uses socket programming.

HTML Parser: a HTML parser allows you to mine data by detecting a common template, script or code on a specific website or Webpage. To be able to detect the script or code you have to use one of the many programming languages: HTQL, Java, PHP, XQuery and Python. Once the data is extracted, it's translated and packaged in a way that you are able to easily understand it.

DOM parsing: This is a technique where you retrieve dynamic content that has been generated by client side scripts that execute in a web browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or any other browsers.

URL scraping software: this is the easiest way of scraping URLs as all you need is high quality software that will do all the work for you. You should identify the features that you are interested in and then give command to the software. The software will go through all the sites on the internet and extract the URLs of the pages that have your target features.

We have plenty of information on CPV and Internet Marketing; therefore, if you are looking for URL Scraper tools for PPV you should highly consider visiting our website.

Source:http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/6180373?articleid=6180373

15 Web Scraping Services to Extract Online Data

15 Web Scraping Services to Extract Online Data

Web Scraping or Web harvesting is a technique of extracting data from the multiple web pages. It is the process of gathering the information from world wide web. Actually, Web scraping is very tough and time-consuming process if you do not use any automation software. There are many scraping softwares or you can say scraping tools available which can extract your online data easily for your online businesses.

best-web-scraping-services-tools

Here is the list of best web scraping softwares or tools which are accepted by many organizations.

1. Import.io

Import.io is a web data extraction platform that follows the simple process to extract the web data. It builds your own datasets by importing the data from the web page & exporting the data into comma separated file format. As per the experts, Web app development company leaders and industry legends, it is the easiest way to extract your data. Import.io is having a strength to extract the data from the most complex sites. The best thing about Import.io is, without a single line of code, you can scrap a number of web pages easily.

2. Scrape Box

Scrape Box is specially designed for SEO service providing companies and the freelancers. It is the SEO tool that can be used for multipurpose SEO related stuff. It can be used for the multi purposes such as the search engine harvester, comment poster, link checker, keyword & proxy harvester, etc. Scrape Box makes SEO freelancers’ tasks easy as it is like a marketing helper which automatically does many tasks including harvesting URLs, link-building, competitive analysis, executing site audits, etc. Multi-threaded operation, Highly customizable as per your needs, low price, various free add-ons and 24/7 support are the other remarkable features that encourage people for use it.

3. CloudScrape

CloudScrape is the browser based editor or you can say data extraction tool generally used for web scraping, web crawling and big data collection in real time. It gives the facility of saving the collected data on different cloud platforms like Google Drive or Box.net. You can also export your collected data as CSV or JSON. This cloud-scraping service helps in navigation through websites, fill the form, build robots as well as extracting real time data.

4. TheWebMiner

TheWebminer is a popular company that offers high-level web data extraction solutions. It serves web scraping services along with the many more data processing solutions. It is offering automation and consulting services in the era of web data extraction. From one time scraping of the single site to daily reports of multiple competitors, TheWebMiner fulfills your all requirements down to the earth. It also provides data conversion from one format to any other format. It cleans your data by removing duplicates & other irrelevant content. Data analysis in different tiers can also be done by TheWebMiner.

5. 80legs

80legs is a powerful cum flexible web crawling service. Whether you want to use 80legs’ existing scrapers or you want to build your own scrapers, it provides the tool that can help you to scrap the data very speedily. The web scraper claims to over 6 lacs plus domains. Industry leaders like PayPal and MailChimp also use 80legs for web scraping & web crawling. High-performance web crawling with faster speed makes 80legs unique. You can run your own web crawls and/or collect data anywhere from the internet using 80legs.

6. Mozenda

Mozenda is the genuine and advanced data scraping and web data extraction tool recognized by many major brands. It comes with modern cloud-based architecture that offers fast deployment, scalability & easy accessibility. You just need to climb 3 stairs and you are done with your work. At first stair, extract your text, file or images from multiple web pages using Mozenda. At second stair, arrange your data files & export it into popular formats. At last; in the last stair, send your web data to your structured database. Mozenda is the well known because of it’s accuracy that leads to low maintenance.

7. ParseHub

ParseHub is the web browser extension that turns your dynamic websites into APIs. It also converts your poorly structured websites into the APIs without writing a code. It crawls single or multiple websites & also handles JavaScript, AJAX, cookies, redirects, sessions, etc. The user can solve major difficulties in collecting data using ParseHub.

8. Visual Web Ripper

Visual Web Ripper is one stop solution for Automated web scraping, Web harvesting and content extraction from the web. It is one type of web data extraction software that automatically comes to your website and gathers complete content structures. It also comes with some eccentric features like user-friendly visual project editor & repeatedly submit forms for all possible input values.

9. WebHose

WebHose, also known as Webhose.io is a web crawling & data integration software that provides immediate access to real-time & structured data. Continuously crawling thousands of online resources, supports in 240+ languages, covering a wide range of forums, blog platforms & news outlets, fastest integration, a variety of plans and affordable rates are the prominent features of the Webhose.io.

10. Fminer

Fminer is one of the best visual web scraping softwares. It comes with macro recorder and diagram designer. It is pretty easy to use web scraping, web harvesting, web crawling & web micro support software. Other important features are a visual design tool, ability to crawl web 2.0 dynamic websites, options of multiple crawl path navigation, multi-threaded crawling, nested data elements and captcha test, etc.

11. WebSundew

With high productivity & speed, WebSundew rules the world in terms of web scraping & web harvesting. It captures web data with high accuracy as well. It permits users to automate the entire process of extracting and storing the data from websites. It is having a facility of point and click user interface. Data extraction agent is there for given website. WebSundae also provides customer oriented professional support for any kind of query.

12. Content Grabber

Content Grabber is the perfect choice if you want to extract your data by web scraping and web automation. Customer uses this platform to build price comparison portals, market intelligence & monitoring, open source intelligence, content integration and migration, B2B integration or process automation, etc. So, you can also use Content Grabber for a similar type of services.

13. Spinn3r

Want to index blogs, news or social media? Here is the solution. Spinn3r give you the permission to fetch whole data from webblogs, news sites, social media sites, RSS & ATOM feeds, etc. It distributed with a full firehose API which handles 95% of the data indexing requirements. It provides a penetrable admin console. Full-text search, Boilerplate removal, fault tolerance, language and spam detection are the other main features of Spinn3r.

14. WinAutomation

WinAutomation is an automated tool that is specially designed to automate repetitive tasks on your computer. It automatically fills & submits web forms, automatically extracts the data from the web page into text / excel files. WinAutomation automates software robots, automate any desktop application, websites & web applications in such a modern way.

15. Outwit

Outwit is the next generation web harvesting semantic software tool. It is specialized in extracting & organizing online data and media. It will automatically discover a number of webpages or search engine results. Pro version of Outwit provides the facility to navigate from page to page in sequence of results. The tool also lets users extract links, images, email addresses & data tables.

Source:http://www.quertime.com/article/15-web-scraping-services-to-extract-online-data/

What is Web Scraping Services ?

What is Web Scraping Services ?

Web scraping is essentially a service where an algorithm driven process fetches relevant data from the depths of the internet and stores it on a centralized location (think excel sheets) which can be analyzed to draw meaningful and strategic insight.

To put things into perspective, imagine the internet as a large tank cluttered with trillions of tons of data. Now, imagine instructing something as small as a spider to go and fetch all data relevant to your business. The spider works in accordance with the instructions and starts digging deep into the tank, fetching data with an objective orientation, requesting for data wherever it is protected by a keeper and being a small spider, it fetches data even from the most granular nook and corner of the tank. Now, this spider has a briefcase where it stores all collected data in a systematic manner and returns to you after its exploration into the deep internet tank. What you have now is perfectly the data you need in a perfectly understandable format. This is exactly what a web scraping service entails except the fact that it also promises working on those briefcase data and cleaning it up for redundancies and errors and presents it to you in the form of a well consumption-ready information format and not raw unprocessed data.

Now, there is a high possibility that you may be wondering how else can you utilize this data to extract the best RoI- Return on Investment.

Here's just a handful of the most popular beneficial uses of web scraping services-

Competition Analysis

The best part about having aggressive competitors is that you just by alert monitoring of their activities, you can outpace them by enhancing off of their big move. The industries are growing rapidly, only the informed are ahead of the race.

Data Cumulation

Web scraping ensures aggregating of all data in a centralized location. Say goodbye to the cumbersome process of collecting bits and pieces of raw data and spending the night trying to make sense out of it.

Supply-chain Monitoring

While decentralization is good, the boss needs to do what a boss does- hold the reins. Track your distributors who blatantly ignore your list prices and web miscreants who are out with a mission to destroy your brand. It’s time to take charge.

Pricing Strategy

Pricing is of the most crucial aspect in the product mix and your business model- you get only one chance to make it or break it. Stay ahead of the incumbents by monitoring their pricing strategy and make the final cut to stay ahead of time.

Delta Analytics

The top tip to stay ahead in the game is to keep all your senses open to receive any change. Stay updated about everything happening around your sphere of interest and stay ahead by planning and responding to prospective changes.

Market Understanding

Understand your market well. Web scraping as a service offers you the information you need to be abreast of the continuous evolution of your market, your competitors’ responses and the dynamic preferences of your customer.

Lead Generation

We all know that a customer is the sole reason for the existence of a product or business. Lead generation is the first step to acquiring a customer. The simple equation is that more the number of leads, higher is the aggregate conversion of customers. Web scraping as a service entails receiving and creating a relevant – relevant is the key word – relevant lead generation. It is always better to target someone who is interested or needs to avail the services or product you offer.

Data Enhancement

With web extraction services, you can extract more juice out of the data you have. The ready to consume format of information that web scraping services offer allows you to match it with other relevant data points to connect the dots and draw insights for the bigger picture.

Review Analysis

Continuous improvement is the key to building a successful brand and consumer feedback is of the prime sources that will let you know where you stand in terms of the goal – customer satisfaction. Web scraping services offer a segue to understanding your customers’ review and help you stay ahead of the game by improvising.

Financial Intelligence

In the dynamic industry of finance and ever-volatile investment industry, know what’s the best use of your money. After all, the whole drama is for the money. Web scraping services offer you the benefit of using alternative data to plan your finances much more efficiently.

Research Process

The information derived from a web scraping process is almost ready to be run through for a research and analysis function. Focus on the research instead of data collection and management.

Risk & Regulations Compliance

Understanding risk and evolving regulations is important to avoid any market or legal trap. Stay updated with the evolving dynamics of the regulatory framework and the possible risks that mean significantly for your business.

Botscraper ensures that all your web scraping process is done with utmost diligence and efficiency. We at Botscraper have a single aim -  your success and we know exactly what to deliver to ensure that.

Source:http://www.botscraper.com/blog/What-is-web-scraping-service-

Three Common Methods For Web Data Extraction

Probably the most common technique used traditionally to extract data from web pages this is to cook up some regular expressions that match the pieces you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Our screen-scraper software actually started out as an application written in Perl for this very reason. In addition to regular expressions, you might also use some code written in something like Java or Active Server Pages to parse out larger chunks of text. Using raw regular expressions to pull out the data can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, and can get a bit messy when a script contains a lot of them. At the same time, if you're already familiar with regular expressions, and your scraping project is relatively small, they can be a great solution.

Other techniques for getting the data out can get very sophisticated as algorithms that make use of artificial intelligence and such are applied to the page. Some programs will actually analyze the semantic content of an HTML page, then intelligently pull out the pieces that are of interest. Still other approaches deal with developing "ontologies", or hierarchical vocabularies intended to represent the content domain.

There are a number of companies (including our own) that offer commercial applications specifically intended to do screen-scraping. The applications vary quite a bit, but for medium to large-sized projects they're often a good solution. Each one will have its own learning curve, so you should plan on taking time to learn the ins and outs of a new application. Especially if you plan on doing a fair amount of screen-scraping it's probably a good idea to at least shop around for a screen-scraping application, as it will likely save you time and money in the long run.

So what's the best approach to data extraction? It really depends on what your needs are, and what resources you have at your disposal. Here are some of the pros and cons of the various approaches, as well as suggestions on when you might use each one:

Raw regular expressions and code

Advantages:

- If you're already familiar with regular expressions and at least one programming language, this can be a quick solution.
- Regular expressions allow for a fair amount of "fuzziness" in the matching such that minor changes to the content won't break them.
- You likely don't need to learn any new languages or tools (again, assuming you're already familiar with regular expressions and a programming language).
- Regular expressions are supported in almost all modern programming languages. Heck, even VBScript has a regular expression engine. It's also nice because the various regular expression implementations don't vary too significantly in their syntax.

Disadvantages:

- They can be complex for those that don't have a lot of experience with them. Learning regular expressions isn't like going from Perl to Java. It's more like going from Perl to XSLT, where you have to wrap your mind around a completely different way of viewing the problem.
- They're often confusing to analyze. Take a look through some of the regular expressions people have created to match something as simple as an email address and you'll see what I mean.
- If the content you're trying to match changes (e.g., they change the web page by adding a new "font" tag) you'll likely need to update your regular expressions to account for the change.
- The data discovery portion of the process (traversing various web pages to get to the page containing the data you want) will still need to be handled, and can get fairly complex if you need to deal with cookies and such.
When to use this approach: You'll most likely use straight regular expressions in screen-scraping when you have a small job you want to get done quickly. Especially if you already know regular expressions, there's no sense in getting into other tools if all you need to do is pull some news headlines off of a site.
Ontologies and artificial intelligence

Advantages:

- You create it once and it can more or less extract the data from any page within the content domain you're targeting.
- The data model is generally built in. For example, if you're extracting data about cars from web sites the extraction engine already knows what the make, model, and price are, so it can easily map them to existing data structures (e.g., insert the data into the correct locations in your database).
- There is relatively little long-term maintenance required. As web sites change you likely will need to do very little to your extraction engine in order to account for the changes.

Disadvantages:

- It's relatively complex to create and work with such an engine. The level of expertise required to even understand an extraction engine that uses artificial intelligence and ontologies is much higher than what is required to deal with regular expressions.
- These types of engines are expensive to build. There are commercial offerings that will give you the basis for doing this type of data extraction, but you still need to configure them to work with the specific content domain you're targeting.
- You still have to deal with the data discovery portion of the process, which may not fit as well with this approach (meaning you may have to create an entirely separate engine to handle data discovery). Data discovery is the process of crawling web sites such that you arrive at the pages where you want to extract data.

When to use this approach: Typically you'll only get into ontologies and artificial intelligence when you're planning on extracting information from a very large number of sources. It also makes sense to do this when the data you're trying to extract is in a very unstructured format (e.g., newspaper classified ads). In cases where the data is very structured (meaning there are clear labels identifying the various data fields), it may make more sense to go with regular expressions or a screen-scraping application.
Screen-scraping software

Advantages:

- Abstracts most of the complicated stuff away. You can do some pretty sophisticated things in most screen-scraping applications without knowing anything about regular expressions, HTTP, or cookies.
- Dramatically reduces the amount of time required to set up a site to be scraped. Once you learn a particular screen-scraping application the amount of time it requires to scrape sites vs. other methods is significantly lowered.
- Support from a commercial company. If you run into trouble while using a commercial screen-scraping application, chances are there are support forums and help lines where you can get assistance.

Disadvantages:

- The learning curve. Each screen-scraping application has its own way of going about things. This may imply learning a new scripting language in addition to familiarizing yourself with how the core application works.
- A potential cost. Most ready-to-go screen-scraping applications are commercial, so you'll likely be paying in dollars as well as time for this solution.
- A proprietary approach. Any time you use a proprietary application to solve a computing problem (and proprietary is obviously a matter of degree) you're locking yourself into using that approach. This may or may not be a big deal, but you should at least consider how well the application you're using will integrate with other software applications you currently have. For example, once the screen-scraping application has extracted the data how easy is it for you to get to that data from your own code?

When to use this approach: Screen-scraping applications vary widely in their ease-of-use, price, and suitability to tackle a broad range of scenarios. Chances are, though, that if you don't mind paying a bit, you can save yourself a significant amount of time by using one. If you're doing a quick scrape of a single page you can use just about any language with regular expressions. If you want to extract data from hundreds of web sites that are all formatted differently you're probably better off investing in a complex system that uses ontologies and/or artificial intelligence. For just about everything else, though, you may want to consider investing in an application specifically designed for screen-scraping.

As an aside, I thought I should also mention a recent project we've been involved with that has actually required a hybrid approach of two of the aforementioned methods. We're currently working on a project that deals with extracting newspaper classified ads. The data in classifieds is about as unstructured as you can get. For example, in a real estate ad the term "number of bedrooms" can be written about 25 different ways. The data extraction portion of the process is one that lends itself well to an ontologies-based approach, which is what we've done. However, we still had to handle the data discovery portion. We decided to use screen-scraper for that, and it's handling it just great. The basic process is that screen-scraper traverses the various pages of the site, pulling out raw chunks of data that constitute the classified ads. These ads then get passed to code we've written that uses ontologies in order to extract out the individual pieces we're after. Once the data has been extracted we then insert it into a database.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Three-Common-Methods-For-Web-Data-Extraction&id=165416

Significance of Web Scraping Services For Business

Significance of Web Scraping Services For Business

Web scraping service or Web data extraction is used to gather the information from different websites for the purpose of to promote the own business or to sell the certain kinds of information to other users. It is easy to scrape information from websites by using website scraping. Web data scraping service has become an important part of businesses as it is very useful to collect desired information related to particular business. Customers determine the demand in market , they are the ruler of the market. So to grow up the business in the current competitor business world it is very essential to know the needs of customers and their preferences. Data scraping service will help you to find information related to strategies of your competitors, customer's preferences and their preferred location. Web scraping is need of every business like food, healthcare, ecommerce, software development etc. Various uses of web scraping services which is need for development of businesses are:

Due to Increase in competition there is demand for new collection for businesses across the world. The more information you have about market & competitor, better you can withstand in competitive environment. So for data collection web scraping is necessary.

Web extraction service reduces the time & gathered fast data that is required.

In early days Web scraping was done manually by searching data then copy and paste that so it was very tedious, difficult and also a time consuming. But now there are also different tools are available.so Web scraping service avoid manual work, reduce man-hour and also low cost.

To collect information from multiple sources for market analysis and research, data integration web scraping services are required.

Data extraction services help in monitoring stock prices, order status from ecommerce websites and competitor's information.

Affordable web scraping services provides most accurate and fast results that cannot be done by human. For expanding market share Web scraping services is used.

Social media provide platform for creation, access and interchange of people generated data. Social media is a richest platform to understand human behaviour and socity. So for marketing purpose in business Website scraping services will help to extract contact details like email address, website url, phone of persons from different social media websites like facebook, twitter, linkdin, yellopages etc.

Web data scraping convert unstructured data from websites in to structured data and put that data in to database.

Data scraping is used for searching indirect content on internet.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/web-design-articles/significance-web-scraping-services-business-1554361.html

Data Extraction Product vs Web Scraping Service which is best?

Product v/s Service: Which one is the real deal?

With analytics and especially market analytics gaining importance through the years, premier institutions in India have started offering market analytics as a certified course. Quite obviously, the global business market has a huge appetite for information analytics and big data.

While there may be a plethora of agents offering data extraction and management services, the industry is struggling to go beyond superficial and generic data-dump creation services. Enterprises today need more intelligent and insightful information.

The main concern with product-based models would be their incapability to extract and generate flexible and customizable data in terms of format. This shortcoming can be majorly attributed to the almost-mechanical process of the product- it works only within the limits and scope of the algorithm.

To place things into perspective, imagine you run an apparel enterprise. You receive two kinds of data files. One contains data about everything related to fashion- fashion magazines, famous fashion models, make-up brand searches, apparel brands trending and so on. On the other hand, the data is well segregated into trending apparel searches, apparel competitor strategies, fashion statements and so on. Which one would you prefer? Obviously, the second one- this is more relevant to you and will actually make life easier while drawing insights and taking strategic calls.


In the scenario where an enterprise wishes to cut down on overhead expenses and resources to clean the data and process it into meaningful information, that’s when the heads turn towards service-based web extraction. The service-based model of web extraction has customization and ready-to-consume data as its key distinction feature.

Web extraction, in process parlance is a service that dives deep into the world of internet and fishes out the most relevant data and activities. Imagine a junkyard being thoroughly excavated and carefully scraped to find you the exact nuts, bolts and spares you need to build the best mechanical project. This is metaphorically what web extraction offers as a service.

The entire excavation process is objective and algorithmically driven. The process is carried out with a final motive of extracting meaningful data and processing it into insightful information. Though the algorithmic process leads to a major drawback of duplication, unlike a web extractor (product), wweb extraction as a service entails a de-duplication process to ensure that you are not loaded with redundant and junk data.

Of the most crucial factors, successive crawling is often ignored. Successive crawling refers to crawling certain web pages repetitively to fetch data. What makes this such a big deal? Unwelcomed successive crawling can lead to attracting the wrath of the site owners and the high probability of being sued for a class action suit.

While this is a very crucial concern with web scraping products , web extraction as a service takes care of all the internet ethics and code of conduct while respecting the politeness policies of web pages and permissible penetration depth limits.

Botscraper ensures that if a process is to be done, it might as well be done in a very legal and ethical manner. Botscraper uses world class technology to ensure that all web extraction processes are conducted with maximum efficacy while playing by the rules.

An important feature of the service model of web extraction is its capability to deal with complex site structures and focused extraction from multiple platforms. Web scraping as a service requires adhering to various fine-tuning processes. This is exactly what botscraper offers along with a highly competitive price structure and a high class of data quality.

While many product-based models tend to overlook the legal aspects of web extraction, data extraction from the web as a service covers it much more ingeniously. While associating with botscraper as web scraping service provider, legal problems should be the least of your worries.

Botscraper as a company and technology ensures that all politeness protocol, penetration limits, robots.txt and even the informal code of ethics is considered while extracting the most relevant data with high efficiency.  Plagiarism and copyright concerns are dealt with utmost care and diligence at Botscraper.

The key takeaway would be that, product-based web extraction models may look appealing from a cost perspective- that too only at the face of it, but web extraction as a service is what will fetch maximum value to your analytical needs. Ranging right from flexibility, customization to legal coverage, web extraction services score above web extraction product and among the web extraction service provider fraternity, botscraper is definitely the preferred choice.


Source: http://www.botscraper.com/blog/Data-Extraction-Product-vs-Web-Scraping-Service-which-is-best-

Web Data Scraping Services At Lowest Rate For Business Directory

Web Data Scraping Services At Lowest Rate For Business Directory

We are the world's most trusted provider directory, your business data scrape, and scrape email scraping and sending the data needed. We scour the entire directory database or doctors, lawyers, brokers, financial advisers, etc. As the scraping of a particular industry category wise database scraping or data that can be adapted.

We are pioneers in the worldwide web scraping and data services. We must understand the value of our customer database, we email id with the greatest effort to collect data. We are lawyers, doctors, brokers, realtors, schools, students, universities, IT managers, pubs, bars, nightclubs, dance clubs, financial advisers, liquor stores, Face book, Twitter, pharmaceutical companies, mortgage broker scraped data, accounting firms, car dealers , artists, shop health and job portals.

Our business database development services to try and get real quality at the lowest possible industry. Example worked. We have a quick turnaround time can be a business mailing database. Our business database development services to try and get real quality at the lowest possible industry. Example worked. We have a quick turnaround time can be a business mailing database.

We are the world's most trusted provider directory, your business data scrape, and scrape email scraping and sending the data needed. We scour the entire directory database or doctors, lawyers, brokers, financial advisers, etc., as the scraping of a particular industry category wise database scraping or data that can be adapted.

We are pioneers in the worldwide web scraping and data services. We must understand the value of our customer database, we email id with the greatest effort to collect data. We are lawyers, doctors, brokers, realtors, schools, students, universities, IT managers, pubs, bars, nightclubs, dance clubs, financial advisers, liquor stores, Face book, Twitter, pharmaceutical companies, mortgage broker scraped data, accounting firms, car dealers , artists, shop health and job portals.

What a great resource for specific information or content with little success to gather and have tried to organize themselves in a folder? You no longer need to worry, and data processing services through our website search are the best solution for your problem.

We currently have an "information explosion" phase of the walk, where there is so much information and content information for an event or a small group of channels.

Order without the benefit of you and your customers a little truth to that information. You use information and material is easy to organize in a way that is needed. Something other than a small business guide, simply create a separate folder in less than an hour.

Our technology-specific Web database for you to a similar configuration and database development to use. In addition, we finished our services can help you through the data to identify the sources of information for web pages to follow. This is a cost effective way to create a database.

We offer directory database, company name, address, the state, country, phone, email and website URL to take. In recent projects we have completed. We have a quick turnaround time can be a business mailing database. Our business database development services to try and get real quality at the lowest possible industry.

Source:http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/web-data-scraping-services-at-lowest-rate-for-business-directory

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Data-Mining---How-Does-it-Help-Businesses?&id=3860679

Know about what is screen scraping!

Know about what is screen scraping!

In present scenario, world is becoming hugely competitive. Business owners always look excited to get benefits as well as best results. They are eager to grow their business hugely as well as effective manner. Currently, majority of businessmen are available online. There are several industries that are available over the web today and trying to make effective promotion of their products as well as services with the support of their particular websites. Majority of people are now using internet services for several purposes. People use online facilities to get contact details of other users. More to the point, businessmen usually look excited to get software that can make them able to get the preferred data in an instant manner. In this case, screen scraping tool will be the best option among all. At present, there are a number of people who are excited to know that What Is Screen Scraping . As far as screen scrapping is concerned, it is a process that makes you able to extract huge data from website in a very little time.

There would be really no other best option instead of screen scraping software when it comes to mining huge amount of data from websites in a very short time. This specific program is getting huge attention of the people nowadays. This program is extremely capable to extract huge amount of data from websites in a matter of seconds. It has helped business professionals a lot in terms of growing their popularity and benefit both. With the support of this program, one can easily extract relevant data in a hassle-free manner. Not only this, this software can also easily drag out large files from the websites. Moreover, this software is also capable to drag images from some particular website with so much ease.

This software can not only be used for the purpose of extracting data from websites but also you can submit and fill forms with its support. There is need of too much time when it comes to filling or copying the data manually. This software is now a renowned as well as one of the fastest means of extracting data from websites. This software not only helpful in simplifying data extraction process but also helps websites to become friendlier for the users.

Source: http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/6086054?articleid=6086054

Effective tips to extract data from website!

Effective tips to extract data from website!

Every day, a number of websites are being launched as a result of the development of internet technology. These websites are offering comprehensive information on different sectors or topics, these days. Apart from it, these websites are helping people in different manners too. In present scenario, there are a number of people using internet to fulfill their different purposes. The best thing about these websites is that these help people to get the exact information they are looking out for their specific purpose or requirement. In the past, people usually had to visit a number of websites when it comes to downloading information from internet. People had to do lots of manual work. If you are willing to extract data from website and that too without putting much efforts as well as spending precious time on it then it would be really good for you to go with data scrapping tools to fulfill your purpose in a perfect manner.

Even though, the data on the websites is available on the same format but it is presented in different styles and formations. Gathering data from websites not only requires so much manual work and one has to spend lots of time in it. To get rid of all these problems, one should consider the importance of using data scrapping tools. Getting data scrapping tools is not a matter of concern as these are easily available over the web, these days. The best thing about these tools is that these are also available with no cost. There are some companies offering these tools for trial period. In case, you are interested to purchase a full version of these tools then it will require some money to get it. At present, there are a sheer number of people non-familiars with the web data scraping tools.

Generally, people think that mining means just taking out wealth from the earth. However today, with the fast increasing internet technology terms, the new extracted source is data. Currently, there are a number of data extracting software available over the web. These are the software that can help people effectively in terms of extracting data from different websites. Majority of companies are now dealing with numerous data managing and converting data into useful form which is really a great help for people, these days. So, what are you waiting for? Extract data from website effectively with the support of web data scrapping tool!

Source: http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/6085814?articleid=6085814

Data Mining - Techniques and Process of Data Mining

Data Mining - Techniques and Process of Data Mining

Data mining as the name suggest is extracting informative data from a huge source of information. It is like segregating a drop from the ocean. Here a drop is the most important information essential for your business, and the ocean is the huge database built up by you.

Recognized in Business

Businesses have become too creative, by coming up with new patterns and trends and of behavior through data mining techniques or automated statistical analysis. Once the desired information is found from the huge database it could be used for various applications. If you want to get involved into other functions of your business you should take help of professional data mining services available in the industry

Data Collection

Data collection is the first step required towards a constructive data-mining program. Almost all businesses require collecting data. It is the process of finding important data essential for your business, filtering and preparing it for a data mining outsourcing process. For those who are already have experience to track customer data in a database management system, have probably achieved their destination.

Algorithm selection

You may select one or more data mining algorithms to resolve your problem. You already have database. You may experiment using several techniques. Your selection of algorithm depends upon the problem that you are want to resolve, the data collected, as well as the tools you possess.

Regression Technique

The most well-know and the oldest statistical technique utilized for data mining is regression. Using a numerical dataset, it then further develops a mathematical formula applicable to the data. Here taking your new data use it into existing mathematical formula developed by you and you will get a prediction of future behavior. Now knowing the use is not enough. You will have to learn about its limitations associated with it. This technique works best with continuous quantitative data as age, speed or weight. While working on categorical data as gender, name or color, where order is not significant it better to use another suitable technique.

Classification Technique

There is another technique, called classification analysis technique which is suitable for both, categorical data as well as a mix of categorical and numeric data. Compared to regression technique, classification technique can process a broader range of data, and therefore is popular. Here one can easily interpret output. Here you will get a decision tree requiring a series of binary decisions.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining---Techniques-and-Process-of-Data-Mining&id=5302867

The Truth Behind Data Mining Outsourcing Service

The Truth Behind Data Mining Outsourcing Service

We have come to this what we call the information era where industries are craving for useful data needed for decision making, product creations - among other vital uses for business. Data mining and converting them to become useful information is part of this trend which makes businesses to grow to their optimum potentials. However, a lot of companies cannot handle by themselves alone the processes data mining involved as they are just overwhelmed by other important tasks. This is where data mining outsourcing comes into play.

There have been a lot of definitions introduced but it can simply be explained as a process that includes sorting through huge amounts of raw data to be able to extract valuable information needed by industries and businesses in various fields. In most cases, this is done by professionals, business organizations, and financial analysts. There has been a rapid growth in the number of sectors or groups who are getting into it though.

There are a number of reasons why there is a rapid growth in data mining outsourcing service subscriptions. Some of these are presented below:

Wide Array of services included

A lot of companies are turning to data mining outsourcing because it caters a lot of services. Such services include, but not limited to congregation data from websites into database applications, collecting contact information from various websites, extracting data from websites using software, sorting stories from news sources, and accumulating business information from competitors.

A lot of companies are benefiting

A lot of industries are benefiting from it because it is quick and feasible. Information extracted by data mining outsourcing service providers are used in crucial decision-making in the area of direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relation management, health care, scientific test and other experimental endeavor, telecommunications, financial services, and a whole lot more.

Have a lot of advantages

Subscribing for data mining outsourcing service offers many advantages because providers ensure clients of rendering services with global standards. They strive to work with improved technology scalability, advanced infrastructure resources, quick turnaround time, cost-effective prices, more secure network system to ensure information safety, and increased market coverage.

Outsourcing allows companies to concentrate in their core business operations and therefore can improve overall productivity. No wonder why data mining outsourcing has been a prime choice of many businesses - it propels business towards greater profits.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Truth-Behind-Data-Mining-Outsourcing-Service&id=3595955

Data Mining Is Useful for Business Application and Market Research Services

Data Mining Is Useful for Business Application and Market Research Services

One day of data mining is an important tool in a market for modern business and market research to transform data into an information system advantage. Most companies in India that offers a complete solution and services for these services. The extraction or to provide companies with important information for analysis and research.

These services are primarily today by companies because the firm body search of all trade associations, retail, financial or market, the institute and the government needs a large amount of information for their development of market research. This service allows you to receive all types of information when needed. With this method, you simply remove your name and information filter.

This service is of great importance, because their applications to help businesses understand that it can perform actions and consumer buying trends and industry analysis, etc. There are business applications use these services:

1) Research Services
2) consumption behavior
3) E-commerce
4) Direct marketing
5) financial services and
6) customer relationship management, etc.

Benefits of Data mining services in Business

• Understand the customer need for better decision
• Generate more business
• Target the Relevant Market.
• Risk free outsourcing experience
• Provide data access to business analysts
• Help to minimize risk and improve ROI.
• Improve profitability by detect unusual pattern in sales, claims, transactions
• Major decrease in Direct Marketing expenses

Understanding the customer's need for a better fit to generate more business target market.To provide risk-free outsourcing experience data access for business analysts to minimize risk and improve return on investment.

The use of these services in the area to help ensure that the data more relevant to business applications. The different types of text mining such as mining, web mining, relational databases, data mining, graphics, audio and video industry, which all used in enterprise applications.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-Is-Useful-for-Business-Application-and-Market-Research-Services&id=5123878