Web scraping is known as when you extract large amounts of data from a website to save onto your database. For example, most data you will find on many websites are only available to be seen through a browser and offer no way for you to copy and paste this information for your use. When it comes to manually copying this data it can be a very tedious job because it takes a very long time to complete without an automated process.
Here is where a web scraping API becomes useful because they can easily help you gather the data you want from a variety of websites following your input. Instead of spending days or even weeks gathering the data on your own you can always have a web scraping API do all this work for you.
Here are another few reasons why you should consider a web scraping API:
1- What data can you gather via a web scraping API?
Web scraping is very useful because it helps you gather much more than just text-based information. Via a properly configured web scraping API, you can extract images, videos, audio, contact information and many other kinds of data. Downloading each piece of information on your own can be difficult, yet via a web scraping API, you can simply configure to download the kind of file extension you are looking for and simply wait as it does its magic. There are many web scraping APIs that can be very difficult to configure but there are many other ones that do a great job in helping you set them up.
2- Why would I use a web scraping API?
A robust web scraping API can help you in a variety of data gathering. For example, if you are looking to download data that comes in a variety of programming languages it is possible. You can download data from Scrappy, PHP, Ruby, Java, Python and any other language you may be looking for as long as you configure it to download the data you want. All the data gathered by a web scraping API can be placed on a local database of your choosing or a spreadsheet for later use. Many people use web scraping for contact scraping, data mining and web indexing which helps in providing price comparison, product differences and a wide variety of useful information you can review to improve your company.
3- What difficulties can you find in web scraping?
The first issue when web scraping is getting a good web scraper to use. Many web scrapers can be very difficult to configure to the point of being confusing. On the other hand, also the layout of the website and how the website was programmed can affect how effective your web scraper is. Not all web scrapers are perfect and some may be unable to read certain data no matter if it is due to mistake or protection that this one cannot be copied.
4- Should I use my web scraper or a third-party one?
Depending on the data you need is the web scraper you need to use. For example, if the data you are gathering is from a single or just a few websites it is better to employ a more specific web scraper and customize it to the specific website you are gathering from. If you are gathering data from a wide variety of websites then you can customize your web scraper to only gather certain extensions of files or types of data.
Creating a web scraper on your own can be very difficult and confusing if you have trouble with programming and connecting it online. There are always great alternatives and companies that offer effective and easy to customize web-scraping APIs that can help you save time, stress and relatively hassles free.
At a glance, web scraping may be confusing but it is not and instead, it can be a very reliable solution you can use. If you are thinking of comparing the prices of a wide number of competitions, check the different products that websites offer on a sheet or for a variety of other reasons web scraping can be very helpful for you and your company. Lose no more time with manual data gathering and start gathering data automatically by using zenserp.com excellent web scraping API!
In conclusion:
Web scraping is an excellent way to automate a program to gather the data you need from various websites and can help you save a lot of time when you are doing this process manually.