Showing posts with label Web Scraping Tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web Scraping Tools. Show all posts

Tuesday, 5 August 2014

Collect Targeted Data from Web Using Data Extractor Tools



The use of data to enhance your business prospects is a widely acknowledged fact. It is therefore very important that you have access to relevant data and not just any data in order to further your growth prospects. Utilizing the features and benefits of Web Scraper tools can help you achieve this goal effortlessly.

Customizing Web Extraction Tools for Your Business

The Internet is a maze of information repositories and identifying the right information from the right source may pose to be a major challenge. Moreover, data incorrectly sourced may result in erroneous analysis leading to a faulty strategy and slow growth for your business.  The risk is, however, considerably mitigated by employing Web extractor tools in your business processes and leveraging the advantages they provide. 

Web extraction tools are used for the singular task of extracting relevant unstructured data from specific web sites and providing business users with a set of structured useable data. They perform this vital task with the help of scripting languages like python, Ruby, or Java. The biggest advantage of utilizing Web extraction tools is its ability to be customized as per the business requirement. This is easily achieved by defining the specific seed list you wish to scrape in the crawler script. A Seed list is the series of URLs that you wish to scan in order to extract the relevant data.  Thus defined, the crawler will scan only the targeted URLs. Along with the Seed list you can also specify the following relevant information to customize the scraper tool and ensure that it delivers as per your requirement. These defining parameters include:


  • Define the number of pages you wish the scraper to crawl

  • Define the specific file types you want the scraper to crawl
  • Define the type of data you would like to extract
This ensures that you can launch a focused search for the specific type of data that you wish to extract and also defines the appropriate source you want the crawler to access.

Benefits of using Targeted Data 

Every business pertains to a specific domain. Its growth prospects, its revenue and its present standing are all defined by the demands and dynamics of that domain. Therefore, undertaking a study of its individual domain is one of the chief pre-requisites that your business must concentrate its efforts on in order to accelerate its growth. Moreover, through your business, you need to conduct a detailed analysis of competitive data in order to remain contextual in your specialized domain. Web Extractor tools have been equipped to understand this need and scrape pertinent data to foster growth patterns that strike the right chords. Some of the benefits leveraged from the extraction of targeted data include:

  • Updated financial information from competitor sites on stock prices and product prices helps you to estimate and launch competitive rates for your stocks and products
  • Studying market trends for a competitor’s products help you to position your product and plan your promotional campaigns effectively
  • Studying analytics of competitor websites will ensure that you are able to plan your web promotions in a far more effective way
  • Extracting data from blogs and websites that cater to your personal interests and hobby areas help you to build up your own knowledge repository which you can leverage to achieve benefits for your business as and when required.

Monday, 21 July 2014

Web Data Scraping - Scrape Business Data in no time

The Internet has evolved as one of the largest repositories of information for your business. You can design intelligent business processes to access a whole host of relevant information sources that will help you strategize, implement and deliver effective business objectives. Leveraging the benefits and usefulness of Web Scraping Tools is one such methodology that most businesses have adopted. Let us take a look at some of the ways it helps you easily scrape data relevant for your business.

Scraping for Business Information

Web Data Scraping is a technique, employed by most organizations. It involves the implementation of tools that help businesses extract unstructured data and convert them into usable business information. The focus of most scraping initiatives revolves around the organization’s need to glean the following information:
  • Competitor analysis to structure and strategist effectively 
  • Price comparisons to price their products competitively 
  • Customer feedbacks to enhance their product portfolio and provide customers with better brand experience   Market dynamics to help them identify areas of opportunities and threats
Using Scraping Tools

The abundance of information available on the Internet that helps you build up a productive business strategy can be easily extracted and leveraged to benefit your business. Tools have been designed with intuitive interface and intelligent algorithms which help in furthering this end. 
 
Website Data Scraping tools are equipped for compatibility with a wide variety of applications so as to be able to explore a huge range of information sources.  These tools are fully automated and display the drag and drop facility ensuring users get to leverage the benefits of speed and convenience.

Data extraction tools are not only adept at extracting data, but are also equally well-equipped to combine relevant statistics from several social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Google Analytics and so on. This helps businesses to analyse trends and plan strategies accordingly. 

Challenges of the Data Scraping Process

Just as there is no dearth of data to be collected from the Web, there is also an abundance of web scraping tools to execute the data collection process. However, the capability of the tool to help you collect the appropriate data needs to be assured before you can proceed with its implementation. Some of the challenges faced by most businesses owing to their wrong choice of tools include the following:

  • Run-of-the-mill extraction tools are unable to scale up sufficiently in order to capture large volumes of data
  • Some tools are also unable to establish compatibility with most data sources and therefore do not provide a holistic data collection approach
  • Some tools are also not equipped to conduct an automatic detection of updates made to a data source and therefore end up providing inaccurate data.
In the light of all this it is essential that you identify the right tool for your need and select one that is embedded with an updated technology to help you achieve the following:

  • Ensure that you are able to access the appropriate data that you want
  • Help you structure it in the format you want
  • Provide quick and easy access to all available data sources no matter how complex
  • Run accurately and is a reliable source to help you churn out usable information.