Scraping Work
What Is Web Scraping And How Does It Work? | Zyte.com
In today’s competitive world everybody is looking for ways to innovate and make use of new technologies. Web scraping (also called web data extraction or data scraping) provides a solution for those who want to get access to structured web data in an automated fashion. Web scraping is useful if the public website you want to get data from doesn’t have an API, or it does but provides only limited access to the data.
In this article, we are going to shed some light on web scraping, here’s what you will learn:
What is web scraping? The basics of web scrapingWhat is the web scraping process? What is web scraping used for? The best resources to learn more about web scraping
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is the process of collecting structured web data in an automated fashion. It’s also called web data extraction. Some of the main use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, and market research among many others.
In general, web data extraction is used by people and businesses who want to make use of the vast amount of publicly available web data to make smarter decisions.
If you’ve ever copy and pasted information from a website, you’ve performed the same function as any web scraper, only on a microscopic, manual scale. Unlike the mundane, mind-numbing process of manually extracting data, web scraping uses intelligent automation to retrieve hundreds, millions, or even billions of data points from the internet’s seemingly endless frontier.
Web scraping is popular
And it should not be surprising because web scraping provides something really valuable that nothing else can: it gives you structured web data from any public website.
More than a modern convenience, the true power of data web scraping lies in its ability to build and power some of the world’s most revolutionary business applications. ‘Transformative’ doesn’t even begin to describe the way some companies use web scraped data to enhance their operations, informing executive decisions all the way down to individual customer service experiences.
The basics of web scraping
It’s extremely simple, in truth, and works by way of two parts: a web crawler and a web scraper. The web crawler is the horse, and the scraper is the chariot. The crawler leads the scraper, as if by hand, through the internet, where it extracts the data requested. Learn the difference between web crawling & web scraping and how they work.
The crawler
A web crawler, which we generally call a “spider, ” is an artificial intelligence that browses the internet to index and search for content by following links and exploring, like a person with too much time on their hands. In many projects, you first “crawl” the web or one specific website to discover URLs which then you pass on to your scraper.
The scraper
A web scraper is a specialized tool designed to accurately and quickly extract data from a web page. Web scrapers vary widely in design and complexity, depending on the project. An important part of every scraper is the data locators (or selectors) that are used to find the data that you want to extract from the HTML file – usually, XPath, CSS selectors, regex, or a combination of them is applied.
The web data scraping process
If you do it yourself
This is what a general DIY web scraping process looks like:
Identify the target websiteCollect URLs of the pages where you want to extract data fromMake a request to these URLs to get the HTML of the pageUse locators to find the data in the HTMLSave the data in a JSON or CSV file or some other structured format
Simple enough, right? It is! If you just have a small project. But unfortunately, there are quite a few challenges you need to tackle if you need data at scale. For example, maintaining the scraper if the website layout changes, managing proxies, executing javascript, or working around antibots. These are all deeply technical problems that can eat up a lot of resources. There are multiple open-source web data scraping tools that you can use but they all have their limitations. That’s part of the reason many businesses choose to outsource their web data projects.
If you outsource it
1. Our team gathers your requirements regarding your project.
2. Our veteran team of web data scraping experts writes the scraper(s) and sets up the infrastructure to collect your data and structure it based on your requirements.
3. Finally, we deliver the data in your desired format and desired frequency.
Ultimately, the flexibility and scalability of web scraping ensure your project parameters, no matter how specific, can be met with ease. Fashion retailers inform their designers with upcoming trends based on web scraped insights, investors time their stock positions, and marketing teams overwhelm the competition with deep insights, all thanks to the burgeoning adoption of web scraping as an intrinsic part of everyday business.
What is web scraping used for?
Price intelligence
In our experience, price intelligence is the biggest use case for web scraping. Extracting product and pricing information from e-commerce websites, then turning it into intelligence is an important part of modern e-commerce companies that want to make better pricing/marketing decisions based on data.
How web pricing data and price intelligence can be useful:
Dynamic pricingRevenue optimizationCompetitor monitoringProduct trend monitoringBrand and MAP compliance
Market research
Market research is critical – and should be driven by the most accurate information available. High quality, high volume, and highly insightful web scraped data of every shape and size is fueling market analysis and business intelligence across the globe.
Market trend analysisMarket pricingOptimizing point of entryResearch & developmentCompetitor monitoring
Alternative data for finance
Unearth alpha and radically create value with web data tailored specifically for investors. The decision-making process has never been as informed, nor data as insightful – and the world’s leading firms are increasingly consuming web scraped data, given its incredible strategic value.
Extracting Insights from SEC FilingsEstimating Company FundamentalsPublic Sentiment IntegrationsNews Monitoring
Real estate
The digital transformation of real estate in the past twenty years threatens to disrupt traditional firms and create powerful new players in the industry. By incorporating web scraped product data into everyday business, agents and brokerages can protect against top-down online competition and make informed decisions within the market.
Appraising Property ValueMonitoring Vacancy RatesEstimating Rental YieldsUnderstanding Market Direction
News & content monitoring
Modern media can create outstanding value or an existential threat to your business – in a single news cycle. If you’re a company that depends on timely news analyses, or a company that frequently appears in the news, web scraping news data is the ultimate solution for monitoring, aggregating, and parsing the most critical stories from your industry.
Investment Decision MakingOnline Public Sentiment AnalysisCompetitor MonitoringPolitical CampaignsSentiment Analysis
Lead generation
Lead generation is a crucial marketing/sales activity for all businesses. In the 2020 Hubspot report, 61% of inbound marketers said generating traffic and leads was their number 1 challenge. Fortunately, web data extraction can be used to get access to structured lead lists from the web.
Brand monitoring
In today’s highly competitive market, it’s a top priority to protect your online reputation. Whether you sell your products online and have a strict pricing policy that you need to enforce or just want to know how people perceive your products online, brand monitoring with web scraping can give you this kind of information.
Business automation
In some situations, it can be cumbersome to get access to your data. Maybe you need to extract data from a website that is your own or your partner’s in a structured way. But there’s no easy internal way to do it and it makes sense to create a scraper and simply grab that data. As opposed to trying to work your way through complicated internal systems.
MAP monitoring
Minimum advertised price (MAP) monitoring is the standard practice to make sure a brand’s online prices are aligned with their pricing policy. With tons of resellers and distributors, it’s impossible to monitor the prices manually. That’s why web scraping comes in handy because you can keep an eye on your products’ prices without lifting a finger.
Learn more about web scraping
Here at Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub), we have been in the web scraping industry for 12 years. With our data extraction services and automatic web scraper, Zyte Automatic Extraction, we have helped extract web data for more than 1, 000 clients ranging from Government agencies and Fortune 100 companies to early-stage startups and individuals. During this time we gained a tremendous amount of experience and expertise in web data extraction.
Here are some of our best resources if you want to deepen your web scraping knowledge:
What are the elements of a web scraping project? Web scraping toolsHow to architect a web scraping solutionIs web scraping legal? Web scraping best practices
About Price & Web Scraping Tools | Imperva
What is web scraping
Web scraping is the process of using bots to extract content and data from a website.
Unlike screen scraping, which only copies pixels displayed onscreen, web scraping extracts underlying HTML code and, with it, data stored in a database. The scraper can then replicate entire website content elsewhere.
Web scraping is used in a variety of digital businesses that rely on data harvesting. Legitimate use cases include:
Search engine bots crawling a site, analyzing its content and then ranking it.
Price comparison sites deploying bots to auto-fetch prices and product descriptions for allied seller websites.
Market research companies using scrapers to pull data from forums and social media (e. g., for sentiment analysis).
Web scraping is also used for illegal purposes, including the undercutting of prices and the theft of copyrighted content. An online entity targeted by a scraper can suffer severe financial losses, especially if it’s a business strongly relying on competitive pricing models or deals in content distribution.
Scraper tools and bots
Web scraping tools are software (i. e., bots) programmed to sift through databases and extract information. A variety of bot types are used, many being fully customizable to:
Recognize unique HTML site structures
Extract and transform content
Store scraped data
Extract data from APIs
Since all scraping bots have the same purpose—to access site data—it can be difficult to distinguish between legitimate and malicious bots.
That said, several key differences help distinguish between the two.
Legitimate bots are identified with the organization for which they scrape. For example, Googlebot identifies itself in its HTTP header as belonging to Google. Malicious bots, conversely, impersonate legitimate traffic by creating a false HTTP user agent.
Legitimate bots abide a site’s file, which lists those pages a bot is permitted to access and those it cannot. Malicious scrapers, on the other hand, crawl the website regardless of what the site operator has allowed.
Resources needed to run web scraper bots are substantial—so much so that legitimate scraping bot operators heavily invest in servers to process the vast amount of data being extracted.
A perpetrator, lacking such a budget, often resorts to using a botnet—geographically dispersed computers, infected with the same malware and controlled from a central location. Individual botnet computer owners are unaware of their participation. The combined power of the infected systems enables large scale scraping of many different websites by the perpetrator.
Malicious web scraping examples
Web scraping is considered malicious when data is extracted without the permission of website owners. The two most common use cases are price scraping and content theft.
Price scraping
In price scraping, a perpetrator typically uses a botnet from which to launch scraper bots to inspect competing business databases. The goal is to access pricing information, undercut rivals and boost sales.
Attacks frequently occur in industries where products are easily comparable and price plays a major role in purchasing decisions. Victims of price scraping can include travel agencies, ticket sellers and online electronics vendors.
For example, smartphone e-traders, who sell similar products for relatively consistent prices, are frequent targets. To remain competitive, they’re motivated to offer the best prices possible, since customers usually go for the lowest cost offering. To gain an edge, a vendor can use a bot to continuously scrape his competitors’ websites and instantly update his own prices accordingly.
For perpetrators, a successful price scraping can result in their offers being prominently featured on comparison websites—used by customers for both research and purchasing. Meanwhile, scraped sites often experience customer and revenue losses.
Content scraping
Content scraping comprises large-scale content theft from a given site. Typical targets include online product catalogs and websites relying on digital content to drive business. For these enterprises, a content scraping attack can be devastating.
For example, online local business directories invest significant amounts of time, money and energy constructing their database content. Scraping can result in it all being released into the wild, used in spamming campaigns or resold to competitors. Any of these events are likely to impact a business’ bottom line and its daily operations.
The following is excerpted from a complaint, filed by Craigslist, detailing its experience with content scraping. It reinforces how damaging the practice can be:
“[The content scraping service] would, on a daily basis, send an army of digital robots to craigslist to copy and download the full text of millions of craigslist user ads. [The service] then indiscriminately made those misappropriated listings available—through its so-called ‘data feed’—to any company that wanted to use them, for any purpose. Some such ‘customers’ paid as much as $20, 000 per month for that content…”
According to the claim, scraped data was used for spam and email fraud, among other activities:
“[The defendants] then harvest craigslist users’ contact information from that database, and initiate many thousands of electronic mail messages per day to the addresses harvested from craigslist servers…. [The messages] contain misleading subject lines and content in the body of the spam messages, designed to trick craigslist users into switching from using craigslist’s services to using [the defenders’] service…”
Web scraping protection
The increased sophistication in malicious scraper bots has rendered some common security measures ineffective. For example, headless browser bots can masquerade as humans as they fly under the radar of most mitigation solutions.
To counter advances made by malicious bot operators, Imperva uses granular traffic analysis. It ensures that all traffic coming to your site, human and bot alike, is completely legitimate.
The process involves the cross verification of factors, including:
HTML fingerprint – The filtering process starts with a granular inspection of HTML headers. These can provide clues as to whether a visitor is a human or bot, and malicious or safe. Header signatures are compared against a constantly updated database of over 10 million known variants.
IP reputation – We collect IP data from all attacks against our clients. Visits from IP addresses having a history of being used in assaults are treated with suspicion and are more likely to be scrutinized further.
Behavior analysis – Tracking the ways visitors interact with a website can reveal abnormal behavioral patterns, such as a suspiciously aggressive rate of requests and illogical browsing patterns. This helps identify bots that pose as human visitors.
Progressive challenges – We use a set of challenges, including cookie support and JavaScript execution, to filter out bots and minimize false positives. As a last resort, a CAPTCHA challenge can weed out bots attempting to pass themselves off as humans.
Learn more about protecting your site from malicious bot traffic with Imperva’s bot management solution.
What is Web Scraping and Why You Should Learn It? – KDnuggets
By Octoparse Sponsored Post.
What is web scraping?
It is the process of extracting information and data from a website, transforming the information on a webpage into structured data for further analysis. Web scraping is also known as web harvesting or web data extraction. With the overwhelming data available on the internet, web scraping has become the essential approach to aggregating Big Data sets.
So, why should you learn web scraping and who is doing web scraping out there? We are going to address this question by looking into the different industries and jobs that require web scraping skills. To do this, we’ve compiled and analyzed the data extracted from job sites, including Indeed, Glassdoor and LinkedIn.
At last, we also explored web scraping jobs in Google and YouTube, to find out how many jobs requiring web scraping skills and what are the other requirements, in addition to knowing web scraping.
Followings are our findings to share with you. You might be just as surprised as I was. If you are interested in the scraping process, you may want to check our GitHub Repositories to download the crawler, running them on Octoparse FREE app to get the data.
Finding 1: 54 Industries Are Requiring Web Scraping Masters
The statistics below are based on the information collected from LinkedIn. The top 10 industries that have the highest demand for web scraping skills are: Computer Software (22%); Information Technology and Services (21%); Financial Services (12%); Internet (11%); Marketing and Advertising (5%); Computer & Network Security (3%); Insurance (2%); Banking (2%); Management Consulting (2%); Online Media(2%).
Source: LinkedIn-Web Scraping Jobs in United States
The other industries include: Oil & Energy; Construction; Consumer Goods; Defense & Space; Staffing and Recruiting; Hospital & Health Care; Education Management; Nonprofit Organization Management; Pharmaceuticals; Publishing; Research; Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing; Government Administration…etc.
Finding 2: Non-tech Jobs are Requiring Web Scraping Skills
This is also based on the information on LinkedIn. There is no doubt that the most jobs requiring web scraping are tech-relevant ones, like Engineering, and Information Technology. There are, however, surprisingly many other kinds of works also require web scraping skills such as Human Resources, marketing, business development, research, sales and consulting.
Finding 3: Top 10 Best-Paying Jobs
Based on the information aggregated from Glassdoor, there is a big difference in salaries for various jobs, from $25K to $203K. Among all the jobs, senior data engineer and data scientist are the best paying jobs.
Source: Glassdoor- Web Scraping Jobs
(Data based on Glassdoor’s estimate of the base salary range for the job, which is not necessarily endorsed by the employer. ）
Among all the jobs information we collected, the least paying jobs are: Political Reporter and Junior Recruiter, which is starting from $25K and $29K.
Finding 4: Top 10 Best Paying Industries
We also explore on the average paying among different industries, based on the same dataset extracted from Glassdoor.
Finding 5: Web Scraping Skill Required in Tech Company (Google as an example)
Before we jump into a conclusion of all the findings, we also extracted all the web scraping related job posts from the tech Giant – Google, since it’s pretty obvious that software and Information Technology Company are the biggest markets for web scraping experts.
YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, is another example of a tech company of different size and service than Google while also requiring a high level of web scraping skills in different job categories.
Unlike Google, in YouTube, the top 5 Job categories requiring web scraping experts are: Marketing & Communication; Software Engineering, Partnerships, Product & Customer Support, and the last, Business Strategy.
Conclusion
It is safe to say that web scraping has become an essential skill to acquire in today’s digital world, not only for tech companies and not only for technical positions. On one side, compiling large datasets are fundamental to Big Data analytics, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence; on the other side, with the explosion of digital information, Big Data is becoming much easier to access than ever.
With web scraping automation tool becoming “smarter” and popular, even people with no programming background can easily apply web scraping for aggregating all sorts of data, empowering their business & work with the insights from Big Data.
If you wish to learn about web scraping but does not want to deal with Python or other programming languages, Octoparse| Free automatic web scraper, may be a good option for you to get started.
Original. Reposted with permission.
Octoparse V7 Review
Octoparse has recently launched a brand new version 7. 0, which has turned out to be the most revolutionary upgrade in the past two years. With not only a more user-friendly UI, but also some of the advanced features making web scraping even easier. The Octoparse Version 7 is a sleek, powerful and easy-to-use software that makes web scraping from any websites achievable for most people, including non-coders.
Frequently Asked Questions about scraping work
What is scraping used for?
Web scraping is used in a variety of digital businesses that rely on data harvesting. Legitimate use cases include: Search engine bots crawling a site, analyzing its content and then ranking it. Price comparison sites deploying bots to auto-fetch prices and product descriptions for allied seller websites.
Is web scraping a job?
There is no doubt that the most jobs requiring web scraping are tech-relevant ones, like Engineering, and Information Technology. There are, however, surprisingly many other kinds of works also require web scraping skills such as Human Resources, marketing, business development, research, sales and consulting.
How is scraping done?
The web data scraping process Identify the target website. Collect URLs of the pages where you want to extract data from. Make a request to these URLs to get the HTML of the page. … Save the data in a JSON or CSV file or some other structured format.
