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.

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