Wednesday, 12 November 2014

Web scraping services-importance of scraped data

Web scraping services are provided by computer software which extracts the required facts from the website. Web scraping services mainly aims at converting unstructured data collected from the websites into structured data which can be stockpiled and scrutinized in a centralized databank. Therefore, web scraping services have a direct influence on the outcome of the reason as to why the data collected in necessary.

It is not very easy to scrap data from different websites due to the terms of service in place. So, the there are some legalities that have been improvised to protect altering the personal information on different websites. These ‘rules’ must be followed to the letter and to some extent have limited web scraping services.

Owing to the high demand for web scraping, various firms have been set up to provide the efficient and reliable guidelines on web scraping services so that the information acquired is correct and conforms to the security requirements. The firms have also improvised different software that makes web scraping services much easier.

Importance of web scraping services

Definitely, web scraping services have gone a long way in provision of very useful information to various organizations. But business companies are the ones that benefit more from web scraping services. Some of the benefits associated with web scraping services are:

    Helps the firms to easily send notifications to their customers including price changes, promotions, introduction of a new product into the market. Etc.
    It enables firms to compare their product prices with those of their competitors
    It helps the meteorologists to monitor weather changes thus being able to focus weather conditions more efficiently
    It also assists researchers with extensive information about peoples’ habits among many others.
    It has also promoted e-commerce and e-banking services where the rates of stock exchange, banks’ interest rates, etc. are updated automatically on the customer’s catalog.

Advantages of web scraping services

The following are some of the advantages of using web scraping services

    Automation of the data

    Web scraping can retrieve both static and dynamic web pages

    Page contents of various websites can be transformed

    It allows formulation of vertical aggregation platforms thus even complicated data can still be extracted from different websites.

    Web scraping programs recognize semantic annotation

    All the required data can be retrieved from their websites

    The data collected is accurate and reliable

Web scraping services mainly aims at collecting, storing and analyzing data. The data analysis is facilitated by various web scrapers that can extract any information and transform it into useful and easy forms to interpret.

Challenges facing web scraping

    High volume of web scraping can cause regulatory damage to the pages

    Scale of measure; the scales of the web scraper can differ with the units of measure of the source file thus making it somewhat hard for the interpretation of the data

    Level of source complexity; if the information being extracted is very complicated, web scraping will also be paralyzed.

It is clear that besides web scraping providing useful data and information, it experiences a number of challenges. The good thing is that the web scraping services providers are always improvising techniques to ensure that the information gathered is accurate, timely, reliable and treated with the highest levels of confidentiality.

Source: http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/191-web-scraping-services-importance-of-scraped-data/

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