Extracting data from a website is fairly a simple and straightforward process. Images can be saved and text can be copied. However, this kind of data extraction is practically impossible when you need large amount of data from multiple websites for a business use case. This is when automated web scraping comes into the picture. To scrape and extract large amounts of data continuously, an automated web scraping setup can be employed. The benefit is minimal manual interference after the initial setup and fully automated web scraping thereafter. Let’s look at how an automated web scraping setup works.
How automated web scraping works
For a web scraping setup to work on full automation, the bot should be able to navigate through the different pages on a website and save the required data fields. Navigation is the key aspect when it comes to automating a web scraping task. This is because, different websites use different kinds of navigation systems and these vary greatly in terms of the complexity. While some websites use simple numbered navigation, there are some modern websites that use infinite scrolling and other AJAX based dynamic navigation techniques.
In order to get past these hurdles, the developer writing the web crawler program must have sound technical knowledge. Once the machine is programmed to mimic a human user where required, automating the web scraping setup is a relatively simple process. A queuing system is used to stack up the URLs to be scraped and the crawler setup will visit these pages, one by one thereby extracting the data from them.
Automated web scraping service
Considering the complexities associated with setting up a web scraping infrastructure and automating it using complex methodologies, it doesn’t make sense to build an in-house web scraping setup. Companies looking for automated web scraping services can make use of dedicated web scraping service providers like PromptCloud to have their end-to-end data requirement taken care of. Since we work on a Data as a Service model we take complete ownership of the web scraping project and deliver the required data in the format you need.
Advantages of PromptCloud’s automated web scraping service
- Fully managed service
- Dedicated team for prompt support
- Every aspect of the web scraping project is automated
- Automated and manual layers of monitoring for target sites
- Our extensive infrastructure can handle websites of any complexity
- Ready-to-use clean and structured data
Reach out to us to have your web scraping project fully automated and taken care of by our dedicated team.