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Web crawling with its power to collect massive amounts of data from the unstructured pile of information, is definitely a technology worth investing time and money in. There are countless possibilities with the data you can get through scraping the web. The data can help you gain business intelligence, run an aggregator site, build your own search engine, fuel your database — you name it. One of the most creative things to do with websites crawling is to actively crawl list for a set of keywords that would trigger a specified action. This type of keyword crawling or crawl list is especially useful in industries like news and media, where information appearing on the web on particular topics needs to be monitored. Here is all about crawling the web for your keywords.
Industries Where Keyword Crawling Helps
1. News and Media Industry
Keyword-based crawling or crawl list for keywords can be especially beneficial for media companies who are actively looking for news and related content from the internet. If a news company wants to get any new content posted online related to ‘Olympics 2016’, they could set up a web crawler to look for this keyword in a huge list of news sites where it’s likely to appear and get the crawler to fetch articles, sentences or URLs of pages with the keyword. This data can benefit the media company to save their time spent in researching the web manually by humans.
2. Advanced Web based Research
Search engines can cater to small-scale web research needs, and they do an excellent job at that. When it comes to researching a particular topic for business-related needs, search engines won’t be of much help. This is because large-scale data aggregation needs a scalable custom setup made for the particular requirement. A web crawler setup can do the job if it’s programmed to crawl list from the web that has a set of keywords you are researching on. If you are researching a particular topic in deep, web crawling for keywords is the best solution.
For example, the spread of viral diseases across the globe can be tracked and monitored by crawling news sites from all around the world. Since instances of finding an infected patient could get reported by the news sites, crawl list for the associated keywords can help track the spread. This can help governments take precautionary actions depending on the estimated chances of the disease spreading to their country. It can also be used by researchers in the medical field to figure out the causes and cures of certain health issues from the data aggregated on a particular health threat.
3. Brand Monitoring
Brand monitoring is a great way to keep watch on what people are talking about your brand on the web. This can help you identify issues with your product or service at the earliest before problems escalate further and ruin your brand reputation.
Keyword-based crawling can be used for brand monitoring. In this case, the keywords would be your brand and product names. The web crawler can look for instances of your brand/product names in a huge list of source websites and report back with the content in which it appeared. This data could give you an idea on what’s being talked about your brand on the web.
How is Crawling for Keywords done
When it comes to crawling keywords, the sources to be crawled should be well defined. The ideal sources for the crawl would be a list of websites where the content with your required keywords is likely to surface. When it comes to brand monitoring, the source sites would mostly consist of forums and social media sites. For media, the sites would be news sites and blogs. Once your sources are defined, the keywords to look for should be programmatically fed into the crawler so that it can fetch data when an instance of the crawl list keyword is detected.
Conclusion
Web crawl list for keywords requires fairly good know-how of the technology and a high-end tech stack to run the crawlers. Luckily, there are web scraping solutions that can cater to this exact requirement. When you are going the web scraping service route, all you have to know is your sources and keywords. Your company can get the data that it needs with the option to decide your preferred document format like JSON, XML or CSV. The data is delivered in a clean and structured format which is ready to plug and play.
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