Quora is a place where you’ll get answers of any questions by the top-notch industry experts.
“Quora is an international question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, followed, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions.” – Wikipedia
Here I’ve selected some of the most important questions & answers that have huge impact on Web Scraping Industry and significantly important for individual expert.
Before moving forward, I’d like to take the opportunity to share about myself so that you don’t feel that I’m a stranger to you.
My name is Faruque Azam and I’m a professional data engineer and web scraping expert. As head of “wScraper – Web Scraping Services”, I lead all web scraping, automation & bot development projects and manage client relationships.
I provide my web scraping services to clients of all sizes. I work with individuals, eCommerce retailers, start-ups, corporates, SME/SMBs, academics and non-profits. I’m here to preserve your valuable time and money by exporting data to various usable formats by using web scraping technology.
I can aid your project by paving the way to your goal with more clarity and a higher probability of success.
Is it worth spending time to learn web scraping?
Nowadays, companies require a lot of data which may either be for analyzing their
competitors or keeping an eye on the market. By scrapping we can get this data. If a person owns a business, then it depends on the individual whether the individual wishes someone to help out with this work or not.
If yes, then there may be no need to spend time learning to scrape and data can be easily
extracted by hiring a good scraping service and individuals could focus on more
business strategies and processing the scraped data
While in contrast if the answer is no and there is a requirement to get ample amounts of
data, then learning to scrape could be a good step for accessing millions of data. The tools used while scraping must be authentic as any incorrect tool would end up consuming a lot of precious time.
How much can you make from scraping?
It’s tough to give an exact number of earnings of web scraper as this depends on a number
of criteria like :
● What is the working country?
● What is the position of working(Whether work is done at the beginner level or an
expert level)?
● Which is the working company?
● How is the performance of an individual?
However, with scraping, there is an enormous possibility to make good money.
The Domains like :
- E-commerce
- Blogging
- Recruitment
- Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
- Social Media
- Sales Leads
What is the legality of web scraping?
● Scrapers are not breaching the law or committing a crime unless they are crawling at
a disruptive rate.
● User agreements of websites are not enforceable as websites don’t provide adequate
data about the terms to users.
● As a visitor, scrapers scrape the website data without enrolling as a user and accessing information on the public page would not emerge any contractual terms.
● The trespassing of private data must not be done. As it comes under violating CFAA(Computer Fraud And Abuse Act) and using it for commercial purposes may lead to serious legal complications.
● Copyrighted data when scraped for commercial purposes is considered unlawful and
immoral.
What do I need to know to get into web scraping?
Web scraping is the technique of extracting data from websites that involves the technique
of transforming unstructured data from the web to structured data. It is a large field and the smallest thing might impact the work on web scraping.
● There are broadly two ways to scrape the data: Requesting HTTP for accessing a particular site and then extracting data out of it while the other way is by using a web testing automation tool.
● With the help of python and the library, BeautifulSoup data could easily be extracted. BeautifulSoup is a very valuable library which is mainly used for scraping. Through built-in functions of BeautifulSoup, data could be scraped in a much efficient way.
● Selenium(web testing automation tool) – Tool which can be used to scrape data thoroughly through a website without getting into difficulties. Selenium could be learned as it is much helpful to get better results in data scraping
● Also, understanding of converting the unstructured data to structured data by learning how the data in web pages are structured.
● Process of actual extraction includes :
i) Various stages of process – Requesting the target website for providing content which is obtained by scraper in HTML format.
ii) Parsing – Taking the code as text and producing the type of structure which could be easily understood by computer
iii) HTML parsing – Taking HTML code and parsing all the necessary information
iv) When parsing is done, scraped data can then be extracted either in CSV, JSON format or in any required format so that procuring the information is feasible.
Is it worth paying for a scraping service?
Following questions must be first clear:
What are the practical implementations of Scraping Data?,
Are the businesses in need of a web scraping service?,
Should we hired web scraping services?,
What is to be achieved by hiring a web scraping service?,
Does the site from which data to be scraped involve a lot of complications?
While hiring some scraping services, following points need to taken care of, Because it is worth paying in terms of:
Time,
The quality of data is high,
Data is the yielded in the desired format,
Cost-effectiveness etc.
The hired service provider must also cover your conditions(while there could be no such
assistance that could wrap everything at once).
It’s upon you to choose whether to hire scraping service or not. Being a business person, it is wise to keep your focus on deriving business strategies from the extracted data rather than putting efforts to extract data. And while choosing to hire a data scraping service provider it is crucial to choose the correct web scraper provider for fruitful results.
For helping associations to extract massive data from the web without any irritants,
we offer affordable data extraction services. If you are in need of help with your web scraping projects, get in touch with us and we will be pleased to help.
