3 Different Web Scraping Ways From Semalt
The significance and need of extracting or scraping data from the websites have become increasingly popular with time. Often, there is a need to extract data from both basic and advanced websites. Sometimes we manually extract data, and sometimes we have to use a tool as manual data extraction doesn't give the desired and accurate results.
Whether you are concerned about the reputation of your company or brand, want to monitor the online chatters surrounding your business, need to perform research or have to keep a finger on the pulse of a particular industry or product, you always need to scrape data and turn it from unorganized form to the structured one.
Here we have to go to discuss 3 different ways to extract data from the web.
1. Build your personal crawler.
2. Use the scraping tools.
3. Use the pre-packaged data.
1. Build Your Crawler:
The first and most famous way to tackle the data extraction is to build your crawler. For this, you will have to learn some programming languages and should have a firm grip on the technicalities of the task. You will also need some scalable and agile server to store and access the data or web content. One of the primary advantages of this method is that crawlers will be customized as per your requirements, giving you complete control of the data extraction process. It means you will get what you actually want and can scrape data from as many web pages as you want without worrying about the budget.
2. Use the Data Extractors or Scraping Tools:
If you are a professional blogger, programmer or webmaster, you may not have time to build your scraping program. In such circumstances, you should use the already existing data extractors or scraping tools. Import.io, Diffbot, Mozenda, and Kapow are some of the best web data scraping tools on the internet. They come both in free and paid versions, making it easy for you to scrape data from your favorite sites instantly. The main advantage of using the tools is that they will not only extract data for you but also will organize and structure it depending on your requirements and expectations. It won't take you lots of time to set up these programs, and you will always get the accurate and reliable results. Moreover, the web scraping tools are good when we are dealing with the finite set of resources and want to monitor the quality of data throughout the scraping process. It is suitable for both students and researchers, and these tools will help them conduct online research properly.
3. Pre-Packaged Data from the Webhose.io Platform:
The Webhose.io platform provides us access to well-extracted and useful data. With the data-as-a-service (DaaS) solution, you don't need to setup or maintain your web scraping programs and will be able to get pre-crawled and structured data easily. All we need to do is filter the data using the APIs so that we get the most relevant and accurate information. As of last year, we can also access the historical web data with this method. It means if something were lost previously, we would be able to access it in the Achieve folder of Webhose.io.
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