Why do people need Web Scraping?

Web Scraping

Data Scraping is a popular method of getting content for almost nothing. We call this method “content parsing “or” site parsing”. The method consists in the fact that a specially trained algorithm goes to the main page of the site and begins to click on all internal links, carefully collecting the insides of the div-s you specified. As a result of the work – a ready-made CSV file, in which all the necessary information is in strict order.

Why do people need Web Scraping?

The resulting CSV can be used for the subsequent generation of almost unique content. And in general, as a table, such data is of great value. Imagine that the entire range of a construction store is presented in a table, and for each product, for each subspecies and brand of the product, all the fields and characteristics are filled in. If the content of the online store is handled by a copywriter, then he will be happy to have such a CSV file.

How to start using Scraping?

There are a lot of tools, and there is neither the opportunity nor the desire to try everything. Most people use the services of companies (online web scraper), that specialize in this and guarantee you quality and faster work than you would do yourself manually. Scraper tool allows you to not only manually, but also automatically get new or updated data for the successful implementation of your goals. But for this, you will need to spend a little of your time studying everything and understand this topic more deeply.

How to protect the site from scraping?

Several sites will help you cleverly protect yourself from Scraping: every time you refresh the page, all their div-s get new names (respectively, the names of the classes in CSS also change). This is more than enough to make parsing no longer make sense.

How long does the parsing of a single site take?

No one will answer you for sure, because everything depends on the site itself. It depends on the size of the site, how long the server responds to requests. Some sites can be parsed for 30-40 minutes, and there are cases when parsing a site takes a week.

How do search engines react to this kind of content?

How to use the received data in the future is up to you. You can use ready-made CSV files to generate new texts; as mentioned above, such a CSV file will be very useful both for the copywriter and for various algorithms. Is it possible to insert such content entirely without processing? We don’t know. If you manage to present this content more conveniently, your site will be easier and more comfortable for the user than the source-why not. But we wouldn’t bet on it. Parsed content is a “raw material” that still needs to be processed.

If you want to collect data and create analytics for your organization, Web scraping robots look like a viable solution at no additional cost and no risk. You start scraping to help you verify the economic rationale for using the tool before making any financial commitment to the technology.

Of course, you don’t want to get involved in legal issues or offend other people. Be sure to apply the most ethical standards in your scraping practice. Also, if you decide to do data scraping, remember that there are many systems with the struggle of web scraping. In response, there are web scraping systems that rely on the use of DOM analysis, computer vision, and natural language processing techniques to simulate human browsing to enable the collection of web page content for offline analysis.