Which web scraping tool or service to choose?
With the dramatic increase in the scale of web data extraction done by businesses to get accurate market trends, customer profiles or competitor strategies, it is evident that companies need to choose the appropriate web scraping solution fitting their business needs. Web scraping has emerged as an invaluable tool for businesses as they help garner data & provide insights in a way that was never possible before.
Nowadays, companies from Start-ups to Fortune 500 companies operate in or rely on information from the web for lead generation, reputation monitoring, market research, content curation, event aggregation, etc. Whether it is to know competitor strategies, understand customer profiles or figure out market trends, web scraping has become an integral tool to help make strategic business decisions.
Initially, extracting data meant copying information from the web and pasting it locally, followed by the use of Spreadsheet Software and Offline Downloaders which were able to download complete web pages or parts of it. Later came the era of screen capture, wherein programmed scripts would automatically capture images of the targeted URLs. Data is captured from this image manually or using OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
With the onset of Big Data & Advanced Analytics, web extraction techniques have moved on to enhanced automated techniques like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Although highly automated web extraction processes are available, there is no “One for All” solution. Just because the solution is technologically advanced doesn’t mean that it fits your business needs. Hence, businesses must brainstorm & critically analyze parameters like business life cycle, quantity and type of data, financial & resource investment etc before choosing a web extraction technique.
Read more: https://datafloq.com/read/which-web-scraping-technique-to-choose/7447
