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Although we cannot stress enough the importance of web data extraction in the form of a dedicated service rather than a tool or framework, we sometimes get mistaken for similar kinds of offerings. We’ve had clients ask us if ours is a standalone product. They’re not really at fault here; we do have some elements of everything in our solution. To illustrate this, we decided to give an outline of how we are perfectly cut out for the task of enterprise-grade web data extraction by dissecting the different elements that are part of the solution.
As a product
The client-facing dashboard of our solution – CrawlBoard makes up the product aspect of PromptCloud. CrawlBoard is our requirement gathering dashboard where clients can enter their requirements and opt for various add-on services along with the data.
It’s a streamlined flow from the customer entering his requirements to getting the data delivered through the API or the data download options available on CrawlBoard. From the customers’ perspective, CrawlBoard is a complete product, as it gathers the requirement, facilitates payment, and provides all the essential data delivery options. However, a lot is going on internally in our pipeline. This happens in the framework on which PromptCloud’s data acquisition solution is wholly dependent.
The internal framework
While PromptCloud is far from a DIY tool that’s meant to be able to crawl any website alike, we do have an internal framework that’s ready to be tweaked to fit any requirement with utmost flexibility. This framework makes our setup processes faster and efficient, which helps us provide our customers with fast access to data once the feasibility of the project is established. The internal framework includes crawlers, automated monitoring systems, data cleansing systems, and manual and automated QA. All this together makes PromptCloud a very powerful web data extraction framework.
The service element
Given the variables associated with scraping multiple websites, including the dynamic nature of the web, where sites get updated often, web scraping should definitely have a service element to it. To counter these issues inherent with web crawling and data extraction, a team of skilled programmers and the right tech stack, along with a robust infrastructure, is necessary.
The service element of our solution is also one of the reasons why our clients love us. As a service, apart from creating a custom extraction setup for each project, we constantly monitor the target websites to identify the changes that might need modification of the crawler setup. Monitoring and maintenance are two of the biggest challenges in web data extraction and these can only be addressed by adopting the service model. PromptCloud is a web crawling service in its core with the added goodness of a framework, tool, and service blended.
Bottom line
As many companies are struggling all by themselves to extract the right data from the web, we help our customers get clean, ready-to-use data from the websites of their choice, the way they need it. Venturing into web data acquisition can affect the core focus of companies and it’s better left to the experts. This is one of the reasons why enterprises are increasingly opting for the outsourcing route rather than doing the scraping in-house.
