What is Web Scraping

There are situations in which you need to gather information with a vast magnitude. For instance, forex exchanges have many different currencies for trade and can’t collect them manually. So, what do you do? Of course, you look for a professional solution. In this case, a professional solution is web scraping. Knowing what you need makes your research more accessible. Therefore, let’s discuss web scraping, its types, and how to use it.

What is a web scraping

Whether you need more from the site or gather bulk data, you should have some idea about web scraping. In basic terms, copy-pasting any info from any site to another source is a definition of web scraping. However, due to its functionality and the needs of internet users, we are referring to collecting a vast amount of information if we are talking about web scraping. Since doing this process manually takes eons, it is unavoidable to use web scraping services. If you are looking for an efficient solution, you should seek help from web scraping services. A lot of such services claim to be one of the best web scraping services. However, doing your research, and most importantly, knowing what your requirements are, will contribute to the time and money you will spend for such scraping services. So, how do these services work? In general, they have three steps. To meet your needs, the professionals may either use previously created scraper or develop a new one. Then, that scraper gathers data from the source website, be it a new one or the ready one. Depending on the amount of data to scrap, it takes some time to collect all the data. The final step is delivering to the user result in file formats like Excel, JSON, CSV, or any other type. 

Web scraping types

It is not easy to generalize all of the web scraping services. However, for the sake of simplicity, we can talk about a couple of web scraping types.

Ready solutions

Some sites are already known to have vast amounts of data. Be that Amazon, Alibaba, IMDB, stock exchange markets, or Craigslist. The entrepreneurs are continuously interested in what products are sold most and what their prices are. The experienced developers are aware of this and already have scrapers that successfully isolate data according to client requests. That is, they already have a working scraper, and customers can use it accordingly.  

Browser Extensions

Web scrapers are not available only as independent software. There are browser extensions that can harvest data from the websites. Those browsers have their advantages as well. You install them on your browser, most probably Chrome or Firefox. Another advantage is that they are simple to run. When it comes to the downside, they don’t offer advanced features as they are not built to meet all of the needs. Also, not all internet browsers may have such scrapers. For instance, you may have a hard time scraping extensions if your favorite browser is Safari.

Cloud-based web scrapers

One of the popular solutions. If you use a cloud solution, you are going to have the most significant advantage. You don’t have to install any software or extension. Your PC will not “sweat” to scrap all the data. You can order from the site and get the desired result in a short time. MyDataProvider offers such solutions. Just organize your needs, contact us, and get results that will please you.

Web scraping use-cases

Even though only some of the usages of web scraping were mentioned before, its usage is very diversified. In particular, we can use scrapers to get the stock prices, any other financial data, market research for the products, learn geographics, ages, and any additional demographic info on social media, monitoring news, etc. It seems like only professionals may need web scrapers. However, this is not the case. An average user can use simple scraping tools to get info from the cinema about the movies they screen and their screening times. As simple as that.