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web scraping process
Jimna Jayan

Web scraping, or scraping data from a website, is an automatic method to obtain large amounts of data from websites. It is one of the most efficient and useful ways to extract data from a website, especially in 2024. It has become an integral tool for many businesses and individuals due to its ability to quickly and efficiently gather information from the internet. Leveraging a reliable web scraping process can further enhance the efficiency of data extraction processes. 

Web Scraping Process

The web scraping process plays a pivotal role in supplying data for machine learning models, furthering the advancement of AI technology. For instance, scraping images from websites can feed computer vision algorithms, textual data can be used for natural language processing models, and customer behavior data can enhance recommendation systems. By automating the data collection process and scaling it to gather information from a wide range of sources, web scraping helps in creating robust, accurate, and well-trained AI models.

Web scraping is especially useful if the public website you want to get data from doesn’t have an API, or only provides limited access to web data. In such scenarios, where traditional methods fall short, leveraging external web scraping services like PromptCloud can be a strategic approach. These services offer a more efficient and scalable solution, enabling businesses to extract the necessary data seamlessly. 

Understanding the Basics of Web Data Extraction

A web scraper automates the process of extracting information from other websites, quickly and accurately. The data extracted is delivered in a structured format, making it easier to analyze and use in your projects. The process is extremely simple and works by way of two parts: a web crawler and a web scraper.

Web Scraping vs. Web Crawling: Key Differences Explained

Web Scraping vs. Web Crawling

Source: stackoverflow

What is a Crawler? Understanding Its Function in Web Scraping

A web crawler, which we generally call a “spider,” is an artificial intelligence that browses the internet to index and search for content by following links and exploring. In many projects, you first “crawl” the web or one specific website to discover URLs which then you pass on to your scraper.

What is a Scraper? A Key Tool for Efficient Web Scraping

A web scraper is a specialized tool designed to accurately and quickly extract data from a web page. Web data scraping tools vary widely in design and complexity, depending on the project.

An important part of every web scraper is the selectors that are used to find the data that you want to extract from the HTML file – usually, XPath, CSS selectors, regex, or a combination of them is applied.

Understanding the difference between a web crawler and a scraper will help you move forward with your web extraction projects.

Web Scraping Process: A Step-by-Step Guide to Data Extraction

The web scraping process can be immensely valuable for generating insights. There are two ways to get web data:

Using Website Scraping Tools to Automate Data Extraction

Benefits of Web Scraper Tool

This is what a general DIY web scraping process looks like:

  1. Identify the target website
  2. Collect URLs of the target pages
  3. Make a request to these URLs to get the HTML of the page
  4. Use locators to find the information in the HTML
  5. Save the data in a JSON or CSV file or some other structured format

Simple enough, right? It is! That is, if you just have a small project.

But unfortunately, there are quite a few challenges you need to tackle if you need to extract data at scale. For example, maintaining data extraction tools and web scrapers if the website layout changes, managing proxies, executing javascript, or working around antibots. These are all technical problems that use up internal resources.

There are multiple open-source web scraping processes and tools that you can use but they all have their limitations. That’s part of the reason many businesses choose to outsource their web data projects.

Why Outsourcing Web Scraping to PromptCloud is a Smart Choice?

How PromptCloud's Managed Web Scraping Service Works
  1. Our team gathers your requirements regarding your project.
  2. Our team of web data scraping experts writes the scraper(s) and sets up the infrastructure to collect your data and structure it based on your requirements.
  3. Finally, we deliver it in your desired format and desired frequency.

Ultimately, the flexibility and scalability of web scraping ensure your project parameters, no matter how specific, can be met with ease. Outsourcing your web scraping is usually the way to go for companies that rely on insights from web data.

Why you Should Outsource your Web Scraping?

1. High data quality

Web data providers like PromptCloud have state-of-the-art infrastructure, talented developers, and tons of experience that ensures there is no missing or incorrect data.

2. Low cost

Getting web data from expert providers can be expensive but compared to the cost of building an in-house infrastructure and hiring multiple developers and engineers, outsourcing is the more cost-effective option.

3. Legal Compliance

You may not be aware of all the dos and don’t of web scraping but a web data provider with an in-house legal team certainly will. Outsourcing will ensure you always stay legally compliant.

How Scraping Data Adds Value to Your Marketing & Analytics?

Web scraping process provides something really valuable that nothing else can: it gives you structured web data from any public website.

More than a modern convenience, the true power of web data scraping lies in its ability to build and power some of the world’s most revolutionary business applications. ‘Transformative’ doesn’t even begin to describe the way some companies use web-scraped data to enhance their operations, informing executive decisions all the way down to individual customer service experiences.

Conclusion

Here, we have been in the web scraping industry for over a decade. We make web scraping easy. With our services, we have helped web scrape data for more than 1,000 clients ranging from agencies and Fortune 100 companies to early-stage startups and individuals.Our clients come to us so they can solely focus on making smart decisions and building their product while we provide them with quality web data. If timely and high-quality data is what you need, we can help you. Get in touch with us for custom web scraping solution at sales@promptcloud.com

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