Table of Contents
show
Mobile Applications are flooding the app-stores and new apps with simplistic designs and innovative ideas are taking over the top positions. While the fight is on, one thing’s for certain; innovation is the key. What about the key to innovation you may ask? Well, of course, it is data. At the same time, web scraping is being used far and wide, to obtain data, to boost businesses, and make critical decisions based on something more than just a hunch. We will be discussing some mobile app ideas that use web scraping technologies as their fuel in this blog.
Let me explain with a short and simple example. Say you want to make an app with the latest news of an area. You can just create an application that will crawl news articles on the web with more than one reference to that place’s name. Then the links for these articles found can be shown nicely, in a dashboard, sorted in descending frequency of the word found (here keyword found is the location itself).
So here are some similar app ideas that can be implemented if you have an in-house team with a solid understanding of how web crawling works or you have an experienced team like PromptCloud taking care of your company’s data needs.
1. Brand Value Analysis Mobile App
Companies are no more judged only based on the products or services offered, but also based on their online reputation. This reputation goes up or down based on PR events, customer reviews, word of mouth, and more. Just like Zomato posts a rating out of 5 for every restaurant in the city, would it not be great if we had an application that would show the ratings of top brands in any sector, be it IT, Telecom, or sports shoes?
It can easily be done by collecting data from social media pages, public review sites, and then crunching those data to find which companies fare better in the public eye. This can prove beneficial for people investing in the stock market, or for people thinking of becoming a franchisee of a particular company, etc.
2. Customer Reviews App for Electronics
New electronic goods come up every day, be it the latest smartphones, wearable tech, or gaming laptops. And even though unboxing videos and reviews throng the internet (mainly YouTube), most of these are paid, and there is no way to know the ground reality.
If you want answers to questions like how fast does the brand respond to warranty claims or how does the battery run after a year of usage, the only way to get them is by scraping the web. So building an application, that has electronic goods arranged like in e-commerce sites, but on clicking on a product, one will be able to see the product reviews on various web pages, can prove beneficial to the common public.
No more would the contentment with a product, or frustration remain hidden in a long list of reviews on an unknown e-commerce page. They would all come to light, in a single location.
3. Movie Recommendation and Link Provider App
It is this age of streaming, brands like Amazon Prime and Netflix have revolutionized the movie and television industry. However, it is often difficult to know which movie or television show is available with which streaming site.
An application that can tell you which streaming company of the many available has the movie that you are searching for, would be great. At the same time, the application should also be able to point out similar movies as well as the streaming services that they are hosted on.
4. Linked Article Map Engine
Suppose you are reading an article, and you want to read a similar article or an article on the same topic. You will have to go and search again in Google right? Would it not be amazing if you could get links to similar articles at the bottom itself once you finished reading one? An application like this could find a loyal customer base with much ease.
5. Book Recommendation Engine
Would it not be great to get a book recommendation engine that will match your likes and dislikes and find books? What might seem like a fantasy is quite possible. A book recommendation engine may ask you different things and based on the parameters, can recommend a book for the day. It can even ask you about your mood, check the weather, the time of the day, and accordingly suggest a book. This can be done using a real-time, self-updating web scraper based on data related to books on the internet.
6. Reverse Image Search Engine
Have you heard of a reverse image search engine? Well, it is as simple as this. How would you like an application, where you can upload an image and it will show you images similar to it, which are available on the internet? Such an application can be made possible by leveraging web scraping services and then applying some image recognition algorithm on top of the data.
7. Price List Downloader
Many brands have pdf price lists, and these are available on various websites. However, a simple google search might not always be able to find these for you. A web scraping application, that can use the brand name provided by you to find publicly available price lists by not just scraping the web but also pdf pages linked to websites, might prove to be perfect for the job.
8. Research Data Finding Mobile App
Although research papers may not always be public data, often parts of research and databases might be available publicly for people to reuse. Putting it all together in the form of a single application, where researchers can fill in certain fields and get the best possible results might prove to be a boon!
9. News Timeline/Related News Finder
When looking at a news article, we might often wonder, “What is the background story?” or we might think a few days later, “What happened after that incident, what did the judge rule?” It would be great if one could build a news application that will always have news links with their timelines and other articles in the timeline with their links too.
10. Movie Quotes Finder
When looking for a punchline to add to an article, it is better to quote from popular movies than old books that none might have read. This way you can connect to the audience better. Be it a blog post or a speech, a quote from a popular character is bound to be a home run.
An application that can find the perfect quote for you once you provide the type of movies you are looking for, the heading of the article/speech you need it for, and the median audience age, can be used by writers around the world to boost their articles or end them with an amazing sentence. (And I will demonstrate that by finishing the article with a beautiful quote about endings.)
“Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.”
-Anna Quindlen
