How Automated Web Scraping Can Ease Your Pain

Data lies on the internet in great abundance, with people generating over 2. 5 quintillion data bytes every day.

This means there is a surplus amount of valuable data on the internet for anyone looking for data. This is excellent news for businesses and companies who must now base every decision upon relevant, valid, and accurate data if they want to be more profitable and grow.

Luckily, these brands no longer have to rely on older data extraction methods but can now employ automated web scraping technologies. They can quickly and efficiently harvest high-quality, more accurate data and fewer errors.

This is why businesses have to learn how to use an auto web scraper, as it makes data scraping more efficient and can solve the many pains that come with manually gleaning data.

Importance of Automated Data Extraction

Automated data extraction is particularly important in business because the data that it quickly provides can be used to perform several essential business operations, including:

• Brand Monitoring And Protection

The internet brings so many things, but several ills also follow in its wake. For instance, while it has become straightforward to do business across the globe due to internet influence, it has also become effortless for people to ruin your business reputation by leaving negative comments and feedback around the web or for criminals to steal your brand’s intellectual assets from any corner of the internet.

Today, one of any business’s priorities is to protect itself from both harms listed above.

This can be done by using web scraping to quickly gather comments and feedback and then address them appropriately to prevent reputational damage.

Web scraping also allows you to see when there is an infringement on your assets to prompt a quick response that can forestall any significant harm.

• Competitor Monitoring

“Know the competition” has become a famous mantra for businesses today. This is important for several reasons.

For instance, only through competitor monitoring can you understand what you are up against in the market and how you can position to beat them.

Web scraping provides you with all the information and details you need to understand your significant competitors and what they might be doing differently.

• Sentiment Analysis

Understanding consumers’ sentiments also strengthens your position in the market as it means you can dish out products and services that directly meet their needs.

You can also study market sentiments to understand when an inevitable trend is over and where the demands will be moving next.

Automated web scraping gives you all the data you need to do this regularly.

Manual vs. Automated Data Extraction

There are generally two main ways of gathering data. You may manually scrape each web page, then scrape each website and repeat this from one website after another until you have enough data, or you can use automated tools to scrape millions of websites and manipulate their data at once.

Some of the challenges of manual web scraping include:

• Geo-Restriction

There are several bottlenecks with manual data collection, including restrictions based on your physical location.

Each communication with any target destination on the web has to be facilitated by internet protocol (IP).

You need an IP address to reach a website, and it needs the same address to return the data you want.

But these websites can also read the IP address and tell where you are browsing. If you happen to be browsing from a forbidden location, these websites have technologies to partially or entirely block you from accessing their content.

• IP Blocks

This is also another challenge widespread with manual web scraping. It occurs when a website sets measures to study every IP accessing its content.

Once IPs have been studied and registered, they can be recognized upon subsequent visits and blocked.

This occurs very often with manual data extraction, which uses only one IP and doesn’t have any way of rotating IPs.

Automated web scraping was invented to solve these challenges. The sophisticated used here can easily bypass geo-restrictions by choosing a different location and overcoming IP blocks by rotating and switching IP regularly to continue scraping.

Other benefits of automated web scraping and significant reasons why everyone needs to learn how to use an auto web scraper include the following:

• Speed

Automated web scraping happens very quickly. From sending out requests to collecting and manipulating data from millions of websites, automated web scraping can perform in hours what would take weeks to achieve otherwise.

• Accuracy

Manual data extraction is unappealing because the data produced at the end are riddled with many errors and almost invalid.

But this is not so with automatic data collection as the data can be harvested with machines, which means fewer errors and greater accuracy.

• Efficiency

Web scraping is a crucial part of doing business, but it is certainly not the only aspect of a business.

Hence, it needs to be done efficiently to save time, energy, and money.

This is what automated web scraping helps achieve as it gets so much done for less time and energy.

Types of Industries That Rely On Automated Data Extraction

Several types of industries and businesses utilize automated web scraping, including the Real Estate industry, Travel and Tourism industry, Job and Employment industry. Also, click here to read how web scraping is used in the automotive industry.

While all these industries use the process to scrape various types of data, the result is often the same; extract a massive amount of data most quickly and efficiently.

Web Scrapers as Specialized Tools

Web scrapers are highly sophisticated software used mainly for automated data extraction. They are combined with other high-end tools such as private proxies to collect data from multiple sources without hindrances and limitations.

They also make web scraping faster in an age where time is everything. Hence, when you understand how to use an auto web scraper, you can save valuable time channeled into other business areas.

In the automotive industry, in particular, auto web scrapers are suitable because they make it easier for vehicle manufacturers to gather market data, produce vehicles that get readily accepted in the market, and protect themselves on all ends.

Conclusion

Web scraping can give you access to a hefty dose of valuable data as we see more and more data being extracted each day.

And while collecting data can sometimes be a complicated process, using automated tools can help to relieve all the pain and make data collection a more efficient business exercise.

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