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"Knowledge is power. Info is liberating." To gain access to one of the best pieces of information, you’re first going to wish to gather some data. Web scraping, data mining and web crawling are effective strategies that will let you simply compile and store info from websites on the internet.  
  
In this piece we are going to examine what is web scraping, the benefits and disadvantages of web scraping and some of the helpful use cases for scraping data.  
  
What is web scraping?  
Web scraping refers to creating or utilizing a pc software to extract data from total websites or just a few web pages. Additionally when you carry out web scraping, you may either download your entire web page or key features such because the tag or article body content for further analysis.  
  
What are the benefits of web scraping for enterprise?  
Achieve Automation  
Sturdy web scrapers mean you can automatically extract data from websites, this permits you or your co-workers to save lots of time that would’ve have otherwise been spent on mundane data assortment tasks. It additionally means that you would be able to gather data at higher quantity than a single human could ever hope to achieve.  
  
Additionally it’s potential so that you can create sophisticated web bots to automate on-line activities with either web scraping software or using a programming language reminiscent of javascript, python, go or php.   
  
Business Intelligence & Insights  
Web scraping data from the internet allows you to seek for competitor costs, monitor their marketing activity and to swiftly market research your business online. By downloading, cleaning and analysing data at significant quantity, you’ll be able to build a better image of your market, your competitor’s activity which in turn will lead to raised enterprise resolution making.  
  
Unique and rich dataunits  
The internet provides you with a rich quantity of textual content, image, video and numerical data and presently contains at the very least 6.05 billion pages. Depending upon what your objective is, you will discover related websites, setup website crawlers after which make your own customized dataset for analysis.   
  
For instance, let’s fake you’re concerned with UK football and wish to understand the sports market in depth.   
  
You possibly can setup webscapers to collect the following info:  
  
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 could possibly accumulate the betting odds for football matches from bookmaker’s corresponding to Bet365 or from player betting exchanges equivalent to Betfair or Smarkets.  
Create applications for instruments that don’t have a public developer API  
By web scraping data, you'll by no means 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 a number of benefits to web scraping compared to accessing a public API:  
  
You possibly can access and collect any data that is available on their website.  
You are not limited to a particular number of queries.  
You don’t need to sign up for an API key or have to abide by their rules.  
Efficient Data Management  
Instead of copying and pasting data from the internet, you can choose what data you would like to gather from a range of websites, then you'll be able to accurately acquire it with web scraping. For more advanced web scraping / crawling methods your data will probably be stored within a cloud database, and will likely be running on a every day basis.  
  
Storing data with computerized software and programs signifies that your company, operations or employees can spend less time copying and pasting data and more time on inventive work.  
  
What are the disadvantages?  
You have to to learn programming, use web scraping software or to pay a developer  
If you are looking to gather and organise a vast quantity of data from the internet, you will discover that existing web scraping software is limited in functionality. Although the software may be good for extracting a number of elements from a web web page, as soon as it is advisable crawl a number of websites they're less effective.  
  
Subsequently you'll need to either invest in learning web scraping strategies in a programming language similar to javascript, python, ruby, go or php. Alternatively you may hire a contract web scraping developer, regardless both of those approaches will add an overhead to your data assortment operations.   
  
Websites recurrently change their structure and crawlers require maintenance  
As websites recurrently change their HTML structure, generally your crawlers will break. Whether you’re utilizing web scraping software or you’re writing the web scraping code, there is a certain amount of maintenance that needs to be frequently carried out to keep your data collection pipelines clean and operational.  
  
For each website that you write a customized encoding script, adds on a specific amount of technical debt. If a lot of websites that you’re accumulating data from all of a sudden resolve to redesign their websites, you will need to spend money on fixing your crawlers.  
  
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