Most of us are aware of how data is affecting our lives. Every aspect of our lives now generates data. It becomes an integral part of everyone’s life, most especially to business. Start-Up to Small, Medium to Large, and Enterprise Business are sometimes built based on crawling and extracting data. Data increases the rapidly expanding technological world of today; it makes the business grow and attain its objectives.
We see data all the time, and it’s everywhere. We can achieve data by Web Crawling.
Web Crawling, aka Indexing, is the process to locate knowledge on World Wide Web (WWW), index the information on the page using bots, also known as crawlers. Web Crawling crawls HTML, content on pages, style sheets, metadata, images, and more. For example, web crawling can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as obtaining e-mail addresses or any desired information needed on any website.
What is a web crawler?
Web crawlers have many names web spiders, web robots, bots, and more. These names are all related to what they do - crawl the World Wide Web to index pages for search engines.
Imagine you are going to the library; you walk down the aisle and look at the books before choosing what you wanted to read.
They are computer programs that scan the web, ‘reading’ everything they find. These web spiders scan the World Wide Web documents to see what words they contain and where those words used. The crawler turns its findings into a giant index. The index is a big list of terms and the web pages that feature them. The goal of such a machine is to learn what every web page on the web is about so that the information can be retrieved when it’s needed. So, when you ask a search engine for pages about Blower, the search engine checks its index and gives you a list of pages that mention Blower. Browsers use crawlers as a means of providing up-to-date information.
Crawlers can also are used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of web crawlers?
Web Crawling becomes one of the vital components of a stable business structure these days. Without data, your business decisions are just a gamble and could even end up being a disaster. These are the advantages and disadvantages of relying to web crawling.
Advantages
Labor-saving technology. Crawling allows people to get information from websites, which will enable people to save time manually collecting data. People can also gather data at a higher volume than a single person can achieve.
Economical and Low Cost. Web Crawling is cost-effective, and it gives an essential service that is within reach of your budget—crawling do the jobs that will match any business demands and requirements.
Easy to use. When the proper mechanism is deployed to extract data, this is an assurance that you are not only getting a single page but the entire domain. With the appropriate investment and plan, a lot of information can be collected.
Market Research and Sentiment Analysis. Public demand and behaviors are essential to all businesses. Data can be a good source of knowing your target customer’s reviews, feedback, and comments. Know your customers better and how they recognize the products and services offered by the business.
Brand and Competitive Monitoring. When a company plans its Online Reputation Management strategy collecting data is a big help. Information is beneficial to understand your audience. Clients talk about products and services via different channels such as social media, professional networking sites, forums, and others. Data can also be used to monitor your competitors offering real-time. Stay up to date on what they are doing, events, products and services developments, pricing strategies, and more. By understanding and use of data the right way, businesses can use them for the greatest advantage.
Lead Generation. Every successful sales team is hungry for leads. Sales are one of the most crucial departments in a business. It is the backbone of any business. Web crawling helps you to crawl data from any sites (social media, professional networking sites, directories, and more) and harvest the information you need, such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses. Then the salesperson can make a sales introduction.
Web crawling can help you collect thousands of leads within minutes.
Disadvantages
Analyzation Challenge. Beginners or no knowledge of coding or development and not an expert in crawling processes are challenging to understand. The only way is to learn to code or hire a developer to understand the process; data extracted need to be treated to be easily understood. It might also take a long time and energy to complete.
Protection and Restrictions Policies. Some websites are complicated to crawl. It needs patience and time to crawl those websites successfully.
Industries Benefiting from Web Crawling
Data has become part of our lives, and it is undeniable that most of the companies are depending on it for growth and to gamble about business decisions. Demands on Web Crawling Tool like Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) are getting bigger.
Here is the list of companies Benefiting from Web Crawling:
E-commerce and Retail
E-commerce and Retail companies use web crawling to gather competitor’s information, collect ideas on pricing strategies, product and service developments, marketing campaigns, and more. Also, collect reviews and feedback to know the companies flaws and improve their product and service. Reviews, feedback, and comments are essential to E-commerce/retail businesses to understand their target market and be successful.
Real Estate
This industry is taking advantage of web crawling by collecting customer profiles and information. Gather data on foreclosure details, homes, mortgage records, agent details, and property information.
Lead Generation
Every business need loads of leads for their Sales Team. Quality sales leads are the source of revenue, the accuracy of delivery, and time which is a vital aspect in business. Data helps a company in decision making in every possible way.
Staffing and Recruitment
Companies who are recruiting can collect information from applicants and businesses who needs assistance. Crawl job pages on company websites or job sites, use social media to gather more information about the market’s demands regarding available positions and companies who needed applicants.
SEO (Marketing, Web Design/Creation, Advertising)
Crawl internet search engine results for Search Engine Optimization monitoring and gathers information about metadata from any websites. Collect data from other websites, use it as a guide to building the website.
Crawling Websites to extract data using Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) API
Crawling websites is not an easy task. There are a lot of challenges, restrictions, and limitations to crawl sites nowadays.
Big data is a powerful tool for most people and businesses; Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) is here to help. We can quickly assist in crawling websites without any sweat. We are the perfect web crawling and scraping service for modern organizations, any industry that needs data. We can collect any information on any website despite all blocks and restrictions and supply the data in the manner that the businesses desire—present functional Crawling API with screenshot feature and scraper tool to scrape a significant amount of data. Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) tools do not damage the website infrastructure, unlimited bandwidth, and traffic, which is a cost-saving and productive service for any business.
Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) is the best web crawling and scraping tool for any industry needs.
