The internet is the number one information provider in the world and it is of course the largest in the same course. Web scraping is meant to extract and harvest useful information from the internet. It can be regarded as a multi-displinary process that involves statistics, databases, data harvesting and data retrieval.
There has been noted a rapid expansion of the web and therefore causing an enormous growth of information. This has led to increased difficulty in the extraction of useful and potential information. Web scraping therefore confronts this problem by harvesting explicit information from a number of websites for knowledge discovery and easy access. It is important to realize that query interfaces of web databases are prone to sharing of same building blocks. It is therefore important to realize that the web offers unprecedented challenge and opportunity to data harvesting. This can be noted in the following ways:
Huge amount of information
A lot of information is found on the internet. The information can range from one aspect to the other. Usually this information is more than want you actually need. Therefore it is a great concern in getting the required information that is also relevant to you. In this case you have to understand that not only the internet offers an opportunity to gather information but the harvesting itself is never an easy task. Web scraping service only gather information that is essential and one that is applicable to customers niche and targets.
Wide and diverse coverage of web information
In the web almost all topics you can think of are covered. Think of any topic, you will realize that such topic is covered widely and adequately. This is an opportunity to get the variety of information. Nevertheless it is still a great challenge of getting information on a particular target from the wide and diverse audience. By use of web scraping the process can be tailored to collect data for a particular field.
All types of data are available on the web
Information is usually stored in many formats. Think of texts, multimedia, spreadsheets, structured tables and so on and so forth. Harvesting such kind of information is a great task that may consume a lot of resources in terms of personnel, time and financial resources. Web scraping service collects analyses the data and stores it in the relevant format for easy reading, application and storage.
Most of the data is linked
This greatly amuses and at the same time annoys me. Almost all the information on the web is linked from one website to the other with several hyperlinks here and there. Such linking may have been used in marketing or any other SEO purposes. When it comes to harvesting information from such sites that make the majority in the internet today, you are likely to mismatch information. Not only would such process be expensive but a waste of time. We tailor web scraping service to remain relevant and collect information only from a particular website and not non-related linked websites. For instance if you want to get information from articles found on the article directories you may end up collecting information from wrong websites due to interlink age.
Most of the data is redundant
The issue with this is that you can collect information that is the same from large number of web pages. This is costly and unacceptable in the business world. Information that is found on a large number of web sites may be similar. This is because of banner advertisements, copyright notices, navigation panels and many others. It is therefore important to engage in web scraping so as to solve such kind of problem. Web scraping avoids such kind of data as it is never beneficial to a business.
Deep web and surface web
Think of a website and the information that is contained. A clear look will indicate two types of data contained in it. Surface data can be regarded as the data which you get by use of browser. There is more information that is protected from public users. This information may be more beneficial than other information that we can regard as surface data. Web scraping service deeps further to such information and thereby equipping customers with relevant and applicable information for their benefit.
The web is ever dynamic
Think of the new information and the old information removed from the web. This makes the web a dynamic environment in which you can rely on. The content keeps changing now and again. By web scraping, organizations are able to monitor such kind of content and provide clients both with the past and latest data.
It is a virtual society
Ever thought of internet. It can be regarded as a virtual society based on the following reasons. The internet is never only about product and services, data but also about interactions about people, organizations and various automatic systems. This usually poses a great challenge when it comes to harvesting of such data. Web scraping ensures that relevant data is held up to date.
Summary
This article has explored why the internet is such a huge resource when it comes to data. It has also explored why harvesting such kind of data is really a great challenge and if not well planned it may consume a lot of resources. The article also details on the most important solution available, that is web scraping and why it should be used by companies to harvest information in a simple and efficient way.
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