Web scraping: build your advantage
web scraping is your partner in getting information from the internet. Automatically and over time. A huge amount of data is available online on the websites. Each day new information appears and waits there to be found. Found and used.
They are hidden in various forms and places. It all depends on what you are looking for. Want to see what industries and job roles are getting in demand? Collect the data from job portals and analyze it to see the big picture. Need insight into your customers' opinions? Get reviews and social media comments to uncover trends and opinions. Create a unique database that only you have access to. The insights will provide you with a priceless advantage in the decision-making process.
It’s all about finding the data, collecting it and storing it. But how do you do this effectively?
How to collect the data?
There are two ways to find and collect such data. Which one would you choose?
Option 1:
Collect data manually. pen up the calendar and schedule the dates for that. Then on a given day, you will spend countless hours visiting websites, copying information and pasting it into spreadsheets or databases. Yes, it’s straightforward. Yes, it's time-consuming, prone to errors and highly inefficient if you want to do it on a large scale, in many places or countries.
Option 2:
Approach it in a modern way. Everything thanks to automated web scraping. Here you can extract the data using specialised tools, libraries and developed scripts. Using this method you spend your time only once, on developing the tool. Later you can only focus on its maintenance, ensuring that everything runs smoothly. Yes, you get alerted when something goes wrong.
Web scraping: how does it work?
web scraping simulates the human navigating the web. For that purpose, two parts join its forces - the crawler and the scraper. The crawler, a specially developed algorithm, browses the web to search the particular data. The scraper, on the other hand, is a specific tool created to extract them from the website.
It sounds simple. However, the challenge starts with trying to access specific websites. The more complex the website, the harder the scrapping. There are also many unknown parameters that have to be included in the algorithm. They derive for instance from website restrictions, like how fast you can click on links. When you scroll them as a human - it’s usually not the problem. But as a bot? They can be challenging.
For our healthcare client, Datali’s team tackled this challenge. To enable healthcare data analytics, we built a database of 300.000+ observations. All this with web scraping, gathering data from various sources. Our experts took care also of data versioning, building the base for the competitive advantage of the future. With that, our client could not only do healthcare analytics, but also compare the changes over time and see the trends.
The web scraping takes place once per month, providing regularly fresh data. In case of an error, you receive a special notification via mail or Slack message. This keeps you updated on what’s happening. If everything runs smoothly, you can use the data as you intend to.
Ready to unlock the full potential of web scraping for your business?
Let Datali guide you through the process.
