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Knowledge is power. Data is liberating." To gain access to the best items of information, you’re first going to want to gather some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are effective strategies that will let you easily compile and store info from websites on the internet.  
  
In this piece we will investigate what is web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and a few of the useful use cases for scraping data.  
  
What's web scraping?  
Web scraping refers to creating or using a computer software to extract data from whole websites or a few web pages. Also if you carry out web scraping, you possibly can either download the complete web web page or key points such as the tag or article body content material for further analysis.  
  
  
What are the benefits of web scraping for enterprise?  
Achieve Automation  
Sturdy web scrapers can help you automatically extract data from websites, this allows you or your co-workers to avoid wasting time that might’ve have otherwise been spent on mundane data assortment tasks. It also means which you could accumulate data at larger quantity than a single human may ever hope to achieve.  
  
Also it’s possible so that you can create sophisticated web bots to automate online activities with either web scraping software or utilizing a programming language reminiscent of javascript, python, go or php.   
  
Business Intelligence & Insights  
Web scraping data from the internet permits you to search for competitor prices, monitor their marketing activity and to swiftly market research your business online. By downloading, cleaning and analysing data at significant volume, you’ll be able to build a better image of your market, your competitor’s activity which in flip will lead to better enterprise choice making.  
  
Distinctive and rich datasets  
The internet provides you with a rich quantity of textual content, image, video and numerical data and at the moment contains at the very least 6.05 billion pages. Depending upon what your goal is, you could find relevant websites, setup website crawlers and then make your own custom dataset for analysis.   
  
For example, let’s fake you’re focused on UK football and wish to understand the sports market in depth.   
  
You can setup webscapers to collect the following data:  
  
Video Content: To download all the football games from YouTube or Facebook.com.  
Football Statistics: You can download your desired workforce’s historical match statistics.  
WhoScored – Goal Data.  
SoccerStats.  
Betting Odds: You would collect the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s equivalent to Bet365 or from player betting exchanges similar to Betfair or Smarkets.  
Create applications for tools that don’t have a public developer API  
By web scraping data, you will never need to depend on the website releasing a public application programming interface (API) to access the data which they show on their webpages. There are several benefits to web scraping compared to accessing a public API:  
  
You may access and accumulate any data that is available on their website.  
You are not limited to a specific number of queries.  
You don’t should sign up for an API key or have to abide by their rules.  
Efficient Data Administration  
Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you possibly can choose what data you would like to collect from a range of websites, then you possibly can accurately gather it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling techniques your data will be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a each day basis.  
  
Storing data with automated software and programs means that your organization, operations or staff can spend less time copying and pasting info and more time on artistic work.  
  
What are the disadvantages?  
You will have to be taught programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer  
In case you are looking to collect and organise an enormous quantity of data from the internet, you will discover that existing web scraping software is limited in functionality. Though the software may be good for extracting several elements from a web page, as soon as you need to crawl multiple websites they are less effective.  
  
Due to this fact you will need to either invest in learning web scraping techniques in a programming language similar to javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you'll be able to hire a freelance web scraping developer, regardless each of those two approaches will add an overhead to your data assortment operations.   
  
Websites commonly change their structure and crawlers require maintenance  
As websites often change their HTML construction, typically your crawlers will break. Whether or not you’re utilizing web scraping software otherwise you’re writing the web scraping code, there is a certain quantity of upkeep that must be frequently performed to keep your data assortment pipelines clean and operational.  
  
For every website that you write a customized encoding script, adds on a certain quantity of technical debt. If a lot of websites that you simply’re amassing data from instantly determine to redesign their websites, you will have to spend money on fixing your crawlers.  
  
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