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In case you are a data-driven company or a technology-based one, or you own any business that is trying to leverage data so as to grow, chances are, that you need a ton of data for analytics and for finding trends. And so, you might be thinking of scraping data from the web in order to create better models or get better insights.
How it all came to be
Data mining isn’t new. It has been done for a long time, from resources ranging from newspapers to web-pages. However, most of it was done manually, and every office would have a few people designated for this work. The work was cumbersome and is obsolete now. Moreover, most websites today have thousands of web-pages, and it is impossible to get them scraped manually. The worst danger with manual extraction is that there is a high chance of human error, and we all know how dangerous, dirty data is.
On the other hand, with the help of automated web scraping, a lot of time and energy are saved. Also, accuracy is enhanced, which in turn makes data more reliable and ensures better results from data analysis. Using modern day data extraction techniques, hundreds of web pages can be scraped with almost ninety-nine percent accuracy in a matter of minutes.
Why is data so important?
Price wars are another reason why companies that are selling any product online, need data-scraping so as to retain their customers. These days, even a slight difference in prices can lead to a shift in loyalties of customers.
Spotting trends in the market before everyone else and leveraging them in order to ride the flow can lead to you becoming a market leader in the segment in the blink of a single season. Many companies are today using similar strategies to apply data-science in segments, never imagined before- from promoting fast fashion to finding the cure for cancer.
The solution
But in the end, the key to all the locks, turns out to be clean, reliable data- something that PromptCloud helps you get easily. Web scraping is a universe in itself, and in case you are trying to integrate a new team for your web-scraping needs, into your eco-system, let me tell you, it is a tedious, and time-taking process, which in the beginning goes through a lot of trial and error- thus wasting time, crucial for business. Problems begin at first step. For the department, you will mostly need R and Python developers, both difficult to find and definitely not cheap.
Next, you need to make sure that the scraping team is aware of your business requirements-
- What type of data you need?
- What structure you need the data in.
- Who are your competitors and how many of them have scrapable data?
- What type of trends you are trying to find.
- Which points you are actually trying to join with the help of data, in order to add some value to your business.
Next will begin the iterations of trials and errors until the data extracted by the newly formed team is accepted by the business handling team that will actually draw insights from the data.
Why PromptCloud?
PromptCloud wants to remove these complicated procedures and the headache of an extra department to manage and handle, permanently, by reducing the entire pipeline to just two actions-
- You give the requirements.
- We give the data.
No need to worry anymore about-
- Servers.
- Data QA cost
- Proxy Services
- Expensive Software Tools
- Infrastructure, Maintenance, and Upkeep
- Monitoring Costs
- Engineers
Instead, you can spend time on complicated data-modeling algorithms and machine learning problems and debate on how you want to exploit the newly gained super-data from PromptCloud.
The relevance of clean and ready-to-use data
PromtCloud understands the importance of data and can even help you understand what type of data you actually need for your business. In case you are an online seller, you will need price data, as well as the data from the various campaigns, and offers that your competitors are running to attract customers.
In case of technology-based companies, you will be needing data from websites, blogs and community pages that are related to your line of business, so that you are able to ascertain what people are actually talking about, what they want from, in a product, or service, why the current market scenario is making them unhappy and what you can do, to gain them as loyal customers.
Blog-sites can help gather which topics and keywords are popular over the internet and in this way to decide which topics to publish articles on, in the coming day, to receive more hits and in turn, generate more revenue.
Also, some companies have started integrating different data sources to back up one finding with another, so as to take crucial business decisions. Since we have experience with multiple multinational companies, we already have an idea about business problems and how to solve them using data. We believe in data cleanliness and put it above everything else and with our services; you get guaranteed data reliability.
The future of data scraping
With respect to the future of data scraping, there are two specific points to keep in mind-
Websites are changing, and so are the frameworks and the protocols. There’s no guarantee that what works for scraping today will work tomorrow as more and more websites try to prevent competitors from scraping their data. However, with..
PromptCloud, you need not worry about this, since we have scraping experience with thousands of websites and can make sure your data-based business runs seamlessly.
Another aspect is the growth of machine learning and artificial intelligence, which changes the scene with the advent of intelligent data mining. PromptCloud provides such intelligence-based services like JobsPikr which will help you solve problems, to which there actually were no solutions, until a year or two back.
