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Web Scraping Tools: Key Insights on What to Look Out For
Web Scraping Tools: In the online world, data is a new currency that determines every business’s level of success. Regardless of your industry or business niche, every company depends on data to derive their insights and strategies.
Data is the crucial new differentiator in the overwhelmingly competitive e-commerce and online business landscape. It’s at the core of every business strategy and marketing research.
Whether you’re just a startup or a well-established business, you need to invariably access, collect, sort through, and analyze huge loads of raw data, and to do that successfully, you need web scraping API tools.
Since there are so many different web scraping tools out there, here are the key insights on what to look out for when choosing your web scraping tools.
Business Benefits of Scraping
Since manual data collection is not only inefficient but tiresome, annoying, and a tedious process that is also prone to human error, the best way to make the most out of it is to automate the process. That’s where web scraping tools come into play.
Web scraping provides the power of automation, and the tools provide a scraping API or application programming interface for accessing the content generated. Since APIs can be customized to modify the final result of the scraping process, they are extremely useful for business and integration processes, as they enable subsequent services and applications based on scraped data.
That’s the main reason why scraping provides a range of benefits for businesses, such as:
● Competition monitoring
● Improved customer satisfaction
● Improved pricing
● Keyword research
● Lead generation
● Improved SEO
Scraping Applications
Simply put, web scraping tools allow businesses to find and collect relevant data that they can convert and save in a format of their choice. They simplify the process of extracting data by bypassing any geo-restrictions or security mechanisms on target websites.
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Because of this, scraping applications are one of the most important things to look out for when choosing a perfect scraping tool for your business. The list of web scraping applications is a long one, but we’ll keep it short:
- Retail and manufacturing
- Equity and financial research
- Data science
- Risk management
- Product, marketing, and sales
- New and reputation monitoring
- Academic
- Data journalism
- Non-profit
- Employment
- Search engine for classified sites
Scraping Power
Web scraping tools search the internet for the target websites to extract data from these specified websites. To extract data, your tool needs to have an adequate amount of scraping power.
These tools are powered up by proxies that allow them to bypass website security measures and restrictions. Websites will try to prevent scrapers from extracting data as it slows down the site.
Proxies solve this problem by allowing scrapers to access data. while Geonode Proxy runs millions of rotating residential proxies in the background and gives the best services. They also protect the user by hiding their IPs and preventing direct contact between the web server and their device. Proxies have their own servers and IPs attached to different locations, which is how they can scrape data from geo-blocked websites.
Also, Read: Different Types of Search Engines
Level of Maintenance
One of the key insights is the level of maintenance for your web scraping tool. There are four common types of scrapers – browser extensions, software, self-built, and cloud-based scrapers. Browsing extensions are easy to run and require little to almost no maintenance at all, but they have limited functionality and allow you to scrape only one page at a time.
Software is a more powerful version but requires a higher level of maintenance as it provides advanced features. Self-built requires the most maintenance, while cloud-based scrapers are the best option for businesses.
Use Complexity
One of the top features of an excellent web scraping tool is the ease of use and scraping complexity. Your tool should be versatile and capable of meeting your expanding data needs. In other words, you don’t want to choose a tool that will slow you down.
Go with a tool with a fully-fledged user interface that allows you to use all features regardless of your technical knowledge and level of tech-savviness. Scalability is a top property to think of when choosing the right scraping tools for your needs.
Coding Requirements
Different websites are built using different programming languages. Therefore, you’ll need a tool that is capable of extracting data from any website. Look for a tool that can go beyond the basic HTML code, such as JavaScript and CSS.
Scraping Prices
Scraping prices depend on the features and maintenance costs of your tool. The more powerful your tool is, the higher the price. Base your approach on whether you want to develop your web scraping process internally or outsource it. It should help you determine the right web scraping approach for your needs.
Choosing the right web scraping tool is a difficult task. If you feel that you need more information about this topic, we suggest you check out Oxylabs’ blog article about web scraping API for more details.
Conclusion
The expansion of the internet made businesses increasingly dependent on data. Having access to the most accurate and up-to-date data is now among the top priorities for every business that operates over the internet.
That’s why the importance of web scraping is ever-increasing. The sooner you start leveraging the power of web scraping, the more you increase your chances of getting ahead of the competition curve.
