Semalt: Why Web Scraping Can Be Fun?
Web scraping is an online process for people who need to extract certain data from multiple websites and store them in their files. According to Hartley Brody (author of the Ultimate Guide of Web Scraping), a web developer and tech leader, web scraping can be a fun and profitable experience. Hartley Brody has downloaded various contents from a lot of websites, such as music blogs and Amazon.com. Through his experience, he understood that practically any website can be scraped. The following are the top reasons why web scraping can be a fun experience.
Websites are better than APIs
Even though many websites have an API, they have many limitations. In case the API provided access to all the information, web searchers would have to adhere to their rate limits. A website would make changes to their website, but the same changes in the data structure would reflect in the API days or even months later. But online marketers can benefit a lot for APIs. For example, every time they log into a site (such as Twitter), the sign-up forms are all set up with the APIs. In fact, an API defines the methods a certain software program interacts with another.
Businesses Don't Use A Lot Of Defenses
Web searches can try to scrape a certain site more than once, without having any problems. Today a lot of firms don't have a strong defense system to protect their site against automated access.
How To Site Scrape
One of the first things web searchers do is to organize all the information they need in a certain way. All the job is done by a code called a 'scraper', which sends a query to a specific web page. Then, it parses an HTML document and searches for specific information.
Websites Offer Better Navigation
Navigating through a not well-structured API can be a very hard process, and it can take hours. Today websites have a cleaner structure, and they can be scraped very easily.
Finding A Good HTML Parsing Library
Hartley Brody focuses on doing some research for finding a good HTML parsing library in a language of their choice. For example, they can use Python or Beautiful Soup. He points out that online marketers who are trying to extract certain data need to find the URLs to request and the DOM elements. Then libraries can find for them all the relative information.
All Sites Can Be Scraped
Many marketers believe that certain websites cannot be scraped. But this is not true. In fact, any website can be scraped, especially if it uses AJAX in order to load the data, it can be scraped more easily.
Gathering The Right Data
Users can find and extract a number of things from various websites. They can copy various data to complete their work by just sitting in from of their computer.
Top Factors To Consider For Web Scraping
Many websites today don't allow web scraping. As a result, web searchers need to read the Terms and Conditions of a certain site to see if they are allowed to proceed. They should also know that certain web pages use software that stops web scrapers. There are also some websites state explicitly that visitors need to set certain cookies to have access.
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