Manual data extraction is still performed in many companies today despite the staff costs involved, but more and more are adapting to these technologies as awareness of the importance of the automation of processes and the incredible cost savings that are achieved.
In addition, the popularity of scraping is increasing at the same rate as trends in business intelligence, big data, and data analysis and interpretation in general. When entrepreneurs understand the importance of data, they look for the best way to obtain it.
The Internet is full of precious information but totally messed up. If we want to take advantage of this information, we need to master searches and spend many hours extracting and sorting it. What we achieve with web scraping is to extract this information and display it in a structured way to be able to take advantage of it.
Business applications of data scraping and web crawling
These are some of the most common business applications and with examples of the use cases that our clients request the most.
1. Obtaining prices and general analysis of the competition
An example could be the one we have mentioned previously with booking. To the booking results, we can add those of Airbnb and other portals to combine them all and get a real vision of the competition at all times.
Large real estate agencies also carry out web scraping of real estate portals as an idealist to see the offer and to scrutinize optimum sales prices for a particular area.
In this section of the competition, it is also very common to be asked for scraping from amazon, aliexpress, eBay …
There are also many companies that directly scrape the prices of suppliers to make purchases at the most optimal prices at the time, thus achieving a substantial increase in profits.
Large companies tend to monitor their competitors websites in real-time, prices with complex forms (as in the insurance sector), new job vacancies, new products or services offered, etc.
2. Lead generation
The generation of leads to prospect new clients through web scraping is another of the widespread uses. However, with the GDPR for the protection of natural persons in relation to personal data processing, the processes have had to be modified a lot to keep them legal.
3. Human resources sector
In the human resources sector, both supply and demand are monitored. HR agencies scrape public job profiles and users monitor job offers.
4. Second-hand markets
The market for second-hand products, in full growth, is another of the applications that we usually demand. In this article, we explain the use case of a used car dealership. All content applies to the second-hand sale and purchase sector in general.
5. Brand and product protection
A new application of data crawling is the monitoring of brands and products. For example, monitoring our products through all channels (especially distributors) to verify that the regulations that we have established are met, the monitoring of Copyrighted brands and products to detect counterfeits, map compliance monitoring, etc.
6. Content aggregators
All content aggregators are based on crawlers. The media themselves use crawlers to see what other media publish and not miss any news.
Another case that works as a content aggregator is price comparators, flight search engines, and other well-known affiliate platforms.
7. Data collection for Big Data, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
All data-driven technologies need to be continuously supplied with new and reliable data; obtaining automation is the only viable way to get them.
8. Tracking of stock and financial markets
Trading and investments in financial markets require a large volume of data to operate judiciously efficiently. We work for extensive brokers programming tools that allow them to collect reliable information, organize and interpret it.
9. Sectoral patent alerts
Monitoring and alerts of new patents related to each research and development sector to keep up to date with the advances of the competition and the innovations that may be useful to us.
10. Documentation for academic and scientific applications
Automation of the entire documentation and data collection process for different study aspects.
11. Information extractions in publications in pdf format
The web is scrapable, but we can also scrape information in pdf format files such as the BOE, sentences, and other official documents.
12. Dark web and deep web scraping
Although it is not such common use, we can also make our crawlers or spiders run in the dark web due to ignorance. Those who use this application the most are the security and intelligence forces to detect infractions of the law and anticipate threats and attacks. A business application of scraping on the dark web is detecting cyber-attacks, fake traffic, hacking networks, security threats, etc.
These apps are just the tip of the iceberg and the best known to users. People and businesses use all kinds of web tracking applications. You can create a bot for almost anything that a human can do manually in front of a browser. At wscraper.com, we specifically design each web scraper tailored to our clients’ needs and for each target web page.
Our final thoughts on data scraping and web crawling business application
Web scraping and web crawling are techniques by which we crawl the web and create structured and usable databases. Although crawling and scraping are not the same, they are often used indiscriminately. There are multiple business applications for data scraping. Everything that a human can do on a web page can be programmed for a robot to do.
Information is the most valuable product in the world, the gold of the 21st century and, with our help, the entire internet can become the database of your business.
