Thursday 13 June 2013

All You Need to Know Regarding Web Scraping Services

What is web scraping anyway? Surely, that’s the first thing in many businesses’ minds when they first hear of the term. With that said, you most certainly should avail of web scraping services because it’s basically your means to improving your decision-making process. At any rate, web scraping is essentially a method of getting data from a multitude of websites in one go (as opposed to copy-pasting data manually from one website, forum, open database, and so forth ad nauseaum). Instead of depending on market research and surveys, you can get your raw data right there on the Internet, but you require a web scraping service and software to streamline data extraction all the same.

The Evolution of Web Scraping in the Modern Era

Finding relevant data in a sea of information that covers all bases can be quite tough for a company to handle. Back in the Nineties, it was a personal in-joke how search engines have a hard time searching for the websites you’re looking for without further disambiguation on your part (plus back then, search engine algorithms were so primitive that even after you attempted disambiguation, you’re still offered the most popular websites in your search string instead of the most relevant ones). At any rate, as search engines have become advanced, so too has data extraction. A multitude of software applications have been developed to help you acquire the most relevant of info.

No longer will you have to sift through “gravel” and “sand” in order to acquire the precious stones underneath; irrelevant entries when it comes to outsourcing Internet marketing (like, for example, outsourcing for call center solutions keeps popping up in your extracted data) will no longer be a problem with the latest web scraping programs currently available. Your marketing data will be filled with raw yet relevant, on-topic information every time that’s quite easy to disseminate, categorize, analyze, and percolate. You’ll spend more time organizing everything into something coherent and useful in your decision-making process than effort in deleting irrelevant, non-sequitur data that shouldn’t have been gathered in the first place.

The Importance of Web Scraping and Data Extraction Techniques

Quite a lot of companies utilize freelancers to manually copy-paste data and scour the web for article sources and whatnot. This is quite inefficient considering the fact that ad campaigns require accurate, on-the-dot information about the target audience and current trends at all times, such that hiring people to do this website-per-website, article-per-article would be detrimental to your business needs. What’s more, there exist web scraping services that are quite dependable in getting the exact information you require in shaping up your advertising and promotional plan without having to pay freelancers on a commission basis to do it for you.

Web scraping services are superior to the labor-intensive method of manually gathering information in light of the latter’s tendency to waste time and effort. The data colleting from such means is also significantly less compared to the resources required to put together such a team of data extractors. Besides which, web scrappers nowadays make use of advanced search algorithms comparable to that to Google Panda and Penguin, such that you’re likelier to get information that you’re looking for via these means.



Source: http://wscraper.com/blog/2013/all-you-need-to-know-regarding-web-scraping-services/

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