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Setting up a new business? Or planning to scale up an existing one? Doesn’t matter which one it is. Web scraping is the best way to extract data for growing your business today. It will help you get valuable insights and information about your latest competition, no matter what you deal in–products or services. Although data scraping has been going on for quite some time, it has never been as heavily used or been considered reliable as it is today.
So, what are the 13 reasons why web scraping is getting more popular since the past decade?
1. Evolution of Web Scraping Service Providers
Web scraping service providers have evolved tremendously over the last few years. With their high-end resources and technical expertise, they can help you obtain data that is important and relevant for your business.
2. Indispensable for Analysts
If you need to analyze data to see the trend, for example, which product is more popular among which age groups, you can get a web scraping service provider to help you with gathering the data that will help you conduct such an analysis. This will not only help you analyze data but also in making an insightful decision.
3. Speed of Data Extraction
In this fast-paced day and age, it makes no sense to manually crawl web pages. It would be costly, prone to errors and most importantly, would take a ton of time. In fact, the rate at which data is growing, a web scraper can crawl as much data in a day as a man could have in a year. Moreover, there is no need to worry about any fatigue. You can keep the server up and running the web scraper all the time.
4. Data Accuracy
In the case of web scraper, data is the product that you gain. This is the data that you will leverage to grow your business. If the data contains errors, you will be facing the wrath of inferior quality data. However, today if you are using good web scraping services, you can count on the highest accuracy levels.
5. Brand Monitoring
Today, bad reviews can even force a company to close. Whether you are an airlines company or you sell pet food, doesn’t matter. One wrong tweet, one bad review by a famous person, and you are done. Perhaps more than advertising, you need to make sure what the public thinks of you, your company, your services, and more. You need to identify your weaknesses and work on improving them.
The best way to do this is by collecting data from review websites or comment pages, be it Twitter, or Instagram, or an e-commerce portal that sells your products. You can even crawl media sites to check if your company got featured in any stories, positive or negative. Maintaining a good public perception can be worked on by harnessing data scraping, and this is the new way to go about it.
6. Business Information
Making separate departments such as sales, marketing, and product. Do you go online to get competitor details? For checking their prices? Their latest promotion tactics and banners on their websites? Or their new PR campaign that won a million likes? No more. Let data work for you, gather data using webscraper and start converting these data into decision-making solutions for you to take your business forward.
7. Data Augmentation
You have a huge bank of data, but something is amiss. Instead of marking your entire data invalid, you can take the help of a website scraping service to help complete your data bank. This, though seemingly small, can make a huge change.
When you are trying to get some particular data set, where you know the value of one column and the rest are blank, a website scraper is really helpful. For example, you need to compare ten cars, but all you have is their names and model numbers. So you can actually note down the parameters you need to compare them with and let the website scrapers help you fill up these parameters for all the ten cars.
8. Real Estate Listing
Gathering information about every single property listed in your city is no small task. And for this very reason, many companies are actually taking the help of web scraping solutions to help get more listings on their websites. Scraping real estate data not only helps with the listing but also helps add pictures to them, which provides the customers with an initial idea.
9. Need for Mining Data for Building Machine Learning Models
Conducting a research experiment and wanting a sizable number of images related to some specific keywords, is an everyday story in many AIs-based companies today. But making ten interns waste their skills on this manually would not be the most efficient way of going about things.
When you can actually crawl the web and search for images tagged to those particular keywords and save them in separate folders, why would you do this manually! You can conduct your research study and build your training and testing a model with ease, without worrying about data collection and data quality.
10. Monitor Price Wars
With e-commerce sites stepping up the heat on real-time price wars, in case you are a business running a B2C or even a B2B platform, you need to get into the big game by participating in these price wars. That is possible only with real-time tracking of prices of products on your website, that your competitors sell as well. To facilitate that, a pricing system powered by web scraping is an essential component.
11. Stock Market Tracking
Your business can be allied with real-time stock market tracking perfectly, using a web scraper. Although web scraping tools already exist, they are not very customizable and hence a real-time application that will provide you the updates and trends specific to your line of business would be very helpful, and easily achievable with automation.
12. Tracking Latest Trends
Dealing with communication or media? For the most part, you need to have men on the ground, but then, you can’t have men EVERYWHERE! That’s where data scraping comes in and serves as a “story gatherer” for you, getting you what’s hot and happening in the various circles in the industry, and what people are talking about.
13. The age of AI
Even web scraping bots are getting outdated, as they have certain limitations. They tend to follow a set of hard-coded rules. But using an intelligent web crawler will help you get better and more useful data with time. For example, initially, when it gathers data for you, you can train it on which of the data it found was correct, and which one was not. Through this continuous process of training and testing, your crawler would get smarter, and so would your business.
