Creating a search engine for flight schedules and prices can be a good business idea based on data aggregation. A portal such as this can be helpful for users to easily check flight schedules and compare prices without actually having to go to the websites of different airline companies separately. Keeping the website design and development part aside, the key requirement for a travel search engine would be the data. Getting hold of relevant data associated with flights can be achieved by our Data-as-a-Service solution. Here is how it works.
Defining the target sites and data points
This is the first step in any web crawling process. Target sites should be selected carefully as the quality of output data will hugely depend on them. Some examples are Flightradar24, Makemytrip, Goibibo, Expedia and Cleartrip. Once reliable sources where the required data is available are selected, it’s time to define the required data points. Data point refers to pieces of information on the target site that needs to be extracted. In the case of airline websites, the data points would be flight names/ID, date of journey, departure time, arrival time, status and the prices.
The web crawling process
The process starts with programming a crawling setup to traverse through pages in the target site and fetch the required data points to a dump file. The data collected initially will contain unnecessary html tags and text, which is referred to as noise. This needs to be removed to improve the data quality. The dump file is run through a cleansing setup in order to remove the noise. Finally, the data needs to be given a proper structure so that it is compatible with databases and analytics systems. Once the crawling setup is done and data starts flowing in, the target sites should also be monitored continuously for changes that would require updated crawler.
Our dedicated web scraping solution can be used to get on-demand-data without worrying about the complex procedures involved in data extraction. Reach out to us to get started now.
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