In this world full of data, an old, rusting term is becoming a buzzword again. Today, we are talking about none other than web scraping. Yes, we know you know what web scraping is and how it helps businesses achieve a competitive edge.
But that’s not what this article is about.
Today, we have gathered to discuss which ways of scraping your business requires. The two most prominent and powerful ways are local and cloud scraping.
Generally, using bots, your business can extract content and data from any website but let’s dig a little deeper into it:
What is Local Scraping?
On-premise or Local scraping is the process of scraping the text appearing on your browser. If your sole requirement is to download the data you find appearing on a single web page, a local scraper is the right tool for you.
What is Cloud Scraping?
Cloud scraping basically scrapes data from websites in the cloud. This includes multiple pages, scheduling, and infinite scrolling within the process. If you are looking for a powerful scraper, cloud scraping is the way to go.
Crawlbase offers its own cloud Storage API to the users to use their cloud for setting up crawling and scraping jobs. It also offers you a hook to get all the scraped data directly into your database or process it further. Scraping jobs can be scheduled on the cloud so you don’t have to worry about the scalable infrastructure needed and your requests are successfully fulfilled on-demand.
Benefits of Local and Cloud Scraping
Both scraping methods come with a multitude of benefits due to the difference in how you handle the data vs how Crawlbase’s cloud does it.
Local Scraping
Local scraping comes with numerous advantages of which a few of them are listed below:
- API Access
For Local Scraping, you get direct access to a web scraping API which is a scraping tool which the end user has to utilize as per their needs. API access has detailed data from the web URL requested and the number of requests remaining.
- Custom Solution Building
Whoever plans to utilize local scraping for automated data extraction needs to be aware that they need to build a custom solution. What they would need is purely dependent on on what you want to accomplish and its level of complexity. You would surely need hardware and the resources with the right expertise to build your solution and manage hardware. This is effective for small-scale solutions but for large, highly scalable solutions, a proper team is needed which can be very costly for most organizations.
Cloud Scraping
Cloud scraping also utilizes Crawlbase’s cloud rather than locally on user side. Some of it’s benefits can be:
- Zero Failed Requests
Cloud scraping beats any custom solution by offering a 100% accuracy rate. So you can expect reliable and fast results with no error at all times. Zero failed requests means that the algorithms enforce and ensure that every request, no matter how many times it fails or how much time it takes, is fulfilled successfully. This can be an added advantage where you pay a little extra to outsource the infrastructure and resources to Crawlbase in return for a highly scalable solution.
- API Hooks
Through API hooks, you can create and update scrape processes and get data for any external data storage or processing. API hooks can be very useful to handle actions remotely or automate them as preferable.
- Cloud Processing
Crawlbase has designed a cloud web scraping solution to cater the evergrowing needs of its users. The solution utilizes AI and the latest techniques to access blocked sites, bans and blacklisting so you get data without any hassles. It is a scalable process that allows users.
Main Differences Between Local and Cloud Scraping
As we discussed earlier, local scraping scrapes the text that is visible on your browser, while cloud scraping covers infinite scrolling. Resultantly, cloud scraping is much more expensive as compared to local scraping.
Local scraping is faster and simpler as compared to cloud scraping, as it allows you to download the screen data in one click. You are not required to sign up for local scraping all the data from this scraping remains on your personal computer. On the other hand, cloud scraping scrapes the web page on the cloud, and you gain access to results after a few seconds.
As a new business, if you are on a budget, we don’t expect you to consider cloud scraping as the go-to method. But the truth is, despite being expensive, cloud storage web scraping pays off its cost because of the multitude of benefits it offers.
When Do you need Cloud Scraping?
Cloud Scraping has a number of uses and benefits
Scalability:
The biggest benefit of cloud web scraping is its scalability.With a scalable cloud computing infrastructure, you don’t have to worry about your web scraping needs being met while your company grows.
Store Data on Cloud:
Your business works with big data when you scrape thousand of pages at a time. In such a situation, storage and processing can become a problem with local scraping. But that is not the case with cloud scraping because your data is processed and stored on the cloud rather than local machines.
Data Formatting:
The best part about cloud scraping is that your tools process the data into a format easily understandable for you. So basically, when you download the data files, they are sorted in a manner that can be used to drive helpful data insights.
Crawler + Crawling API - The Most Potent Data Scraping Combination
With Crawlbase’s Crawler and Crawling API on your side, you can stop worrying about proxy server providers, browsers, parsers, and scraping. The potent combination is the answer to all your business needs ranging from review extraction to price analysis, and from business intelligence to pretty much all your e-commerce scraper needs.
Crawlbase has more than six scrapers readily available for your e-commerce needs. For instance, the Amazon Scraper enables you to get price, title, availability, description, images, reviews, offer listings and relevant information available for the Amazon products. Similarly the Google Scraper bring you structured search results from Google including main sections (ads, related search results, people also ask, snack pack).
Wrapping it Up
So there you have it, a detailed guide to what scraper your business needs! Both local and cloud scraper come with many different benefits, but it all comes down to the requirement of your business.
