The Advantages & Disadvantages of Web Scraping Data
公開日:2022/04/01 / 最終更新日:2022/04/01
“Knowledge is power. Data is liberating.” To realize access to the perfect pieces of data, you’re first going to want to collect some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are efficient methods that mean you can simply compile and store information from websites on the internet.
In this piece we will examine what’s web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and a few of the beneficial use cases for scraping data.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping refers to creating or using a pc software to extract data from whole websites or a couple of web pages. Also when you perform web scraping, you may either download the complete web web page or key elements such as the
What are the benefits of web scraping for enterprise?
Achieve Automation
Robust web scrapers assist you to automatically extract data from websites, this permits you or your co-workers to save time that will’ve have in any other case been spent on mundane data collection tasks. It additionally means you could gather data at better volume than a single human could ever hope to achieve.
Also it’s potential so that you can create sophisticated web bots to automate online activities with either web scraping software or using a programming language akin to javascript, python, go or php.
Business Intelligence & Insights
Web scraping data from the internet permits you to seek for competitor prices, monitor their marketing activity and to swiftly market research your business online. By downloading, cleaning and analysing data at significant volume, you’ll be able to build a greater image of your market, your competitor’s activity which in flip will lead to raised business determination making.
Unique and rich datasets
The internet provides you with a rich amount of textual content, image, video and numerical data and currently incorporates no less than 6.05 billion pages. Relying upon what your goal is, you could find relevant websites, setup website crawlers after which make your own custom dataset for analysis.
For instance, let’s fake you’re enthusiastic about UK football and need to understand the sports market in depth.
You would setup webscapers to gather the following info:
Video Content: To download all the football games from YouTube or Facebook.com.
Football Statistics: You could possibly download your desired workforce’s historical match statistics.
WhoScored – Goal Data.
SoccerStats.
Betting Odds: You might collect the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s equivalent to Bet365 or from player betting exchanges reminiscent of Betfair or Smarkets.
Create applications for instruments that don’t have a public developer API
By web scraping data, you’ll by no means need to rely on the website releasing a public application programming interface (API) to access the data which they show on their webpages. There are a number of benefits to web scraping in comparison to accessing a public API:
You possibly can access and collect any data that’s available on their website.
You are not limited to a selected number of queries.
You don’t have to sign up for an API key or need to abide by their rules.
Effective Data Administration
Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you possibly can choose what data you’ll like to gather from a range of websites, then you possibly can accurately gather it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling methods your data will be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a daily basis.
Storing data with automatic software and programs signifies that your organization, operations or staff can spend less time copying and pasting data and more time on artistic work.
What are the disadvantages?
You will need to study programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer
If you are looking to collect and organise an enormous amount of knowledge from the internet, you can see that existing web scraping software is limited in functionality. Although the software can be good for extracting several parts from a web web page, as soon as it’s essential to crawl a number of websites they are less effective.
Therefore you will want to either spend money on learning web scraping methods in a programming language reminiscent of javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you possibly can hire a contract web scraping developer, regardless each of those approaches will add an overhead to your data collection operations.
Websites repeatedly change their construction and crawlers require upkeep
As websites repeatedly change their HTML structure, generally your crawlers will break. Whether or not you’re using web scraping software or you’re writing the web scraping code, there is a certain amount of upkeep that must be usually performed to keep your data collection pipelines clean and operational.
For each website that you just write a custom encoding script, adds on a certain amount of technical debt. If a lot of websites that you simply’re collecting data from abruptly decide to redesign their websites, you will have to spend money on fixing your crawlers.
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