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Monday 24 October 2016

How Web Scraping Affects your Revenue Growth

How Web Scraping Affects your Revenue Growth

Web scraping is an indispensable resource when it comes to gaining an edge in the competition with the help of business intelligence. As more and more data gets created on the world wide web, the complexity of extracting it intensifies. Web scraping is a technology that demands an extensive tech stack, high end resources and technically skilled labour. Given this resource hungry nature, many businesses prefer outsourcing it to doing the scraping in-house. Here is a brief walk-through of web scraping so that you can get a grip on the whole process and understand how it could affect your revenue growth as a business.

Business intelligence

The competition among online businesses is at its peak. This has more to do with the ready availability of insightful data. When data acquisition at this scale wasn’t possible in the past, businesses made hit-or-miss decisions upon instincts. Now that every activity can be recorded, extracted as data and analysed to arrive at the best business decisions, companies are making the most of it to boost their revenue. This includes monitoring the activity of competitors on social media, price intelligence, sentiment analysis, gathering data for market research and much more. The use cases of web scraping in business is almost infinite. Business intelligence is extremely helpful for the survival of companies in a market that fluctuates often. Implementing a business intelligence strategy powered by web scraping can definitely give a boost to your revenue growth.
Cost centres involved in in-house Web Scraping

Web scraping, despite being a robust solution for extracting data from the web, is not going to be an easy path if your company is not technically rich already. It involves setting up resources like a tech stack and servers that can run the web crawler by a technically skilled team. Following are the primary cost centres involved in the web scraping process.

1. High end servers

Web scraping is a resource intensive process. Considering the importance of uptime here, the crawlers cannot be run on average performance machines. To have the optimum uptime and avoid crashes, the crawler has to be run on high performing servers located in different parts of the world. The quality of servers is crucial to the consistency of the process. Not to mention, these high end servers makeup for a significant amount of the cost involved in web scraping.

2. Technically skilled labour

Scanning through the source code to identify appropriate tags that hold the required data points and creating a program that can automatically fetch these data points from similar pages’ at large scale requires deep programming skills. It goes without saying that employing skilled people would incur cost that could take a hit on your revenue. Ideally, you will need a team of at least 10 to run a web scraping setup in-house.       

3. An extensive tech stack

Although most of the software being used for web scraping are open source, you will find yourself investing in paid software to make certain things easier or faster. Dealing with open source software might not be as user friendly as the paid ones. In any case, having a tech stack with a lot of options is a necessary aspect of web scraping that would incur additional cost.   

4. Maintenance

Building and running the web scraping setup is only half of the story. Since websites undergo changes often, there is a possibility of the crawler setup breaking from time to time. To avoid or solve this at the earliest, a monitoring system that involves both machines and humans is necessary. Monitoring and maintenance contribute to a considerable cost in the web scraping process.
Data as a service

If data for business is your requirement, a better way to acquire it would be to depend on a company that can deliver it via the data as a service route. Web scraping companies have already set up high-end resources required to run the web crawlers that you can utilize to avail web scraping at a much lower cost than what you would incur by doing it on your own. With this, you can also save yourself from the complications and maintenance headache associated with web scraping. Moreover, with a web scraping service, you can enjoy a much higher return on investment owing to the lowered cost of data acquisition. You can use our ROI calculator to compare between the cost of going with an in-house web scraping setup and a hosted solution.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/web-scraping-affects-revenue-growth

Thursday 13 October 2016

How to use Web Content Extractor(WCE) as Email Scraper?

How to use Web Content Extractor(WCE) as Email Scraper?

Web Content Extractor is a great web scraping software developed by Newprosoft Team. The software has easy to use project wizard to create a scraping configuration and scrape data from websites.

One day I came to see the Visual Email Extractor which is also product of Newprosoft and similar to Web Content Extractor but it’s primary use is to scrape email addresses by crawling websites you feed to the scraper. I had noticed that with the little modification in Web Content Extractor project configuration you can use it same as Visual Email Extractor to extract email addresses.

In this post I will show you what configuration makes the Web Content Extractor to extract email addresses. I still recommend Visual Email Extractor as it has lot more features then extracting email using WCE.

Here are the configuration that makes WCE to Extract Emails.

Step 1 : Open Web Content Extractor and Create New Project and Click on Next.

Step 2:  Under Crawling Rules -> Advanced Rules Tab do the following settings

Crawling Level 1 Settings

Follow Links if link text equals:
*contact*; *feedback*; *support*; *about*

for 'Follow Links if link text equals' text box enter following values:
contact; feedback; support; about

for 'Do not Follow links if URL contains' text box enter following values:

google.; yahoo.; bing; msn.; altavista.; myspace.com; youtube.com; googleusercontent.com; =http; .jpg; .gif; .png; .bmp; .exe; .zip; .pdf;

Set 'Maximum Crawling Deapth' to 2

set 'Crawling Order' to Deapth First Crawling

Tick mark below below check boxes:

->Follow all internal links

  Crawling Level 2  Settings

set 'Follow links if link text equals' to below value

*contact*; *feedback*; *support*; *about*

set 'Follow links if url contains' text box to below value

contact; feedback; support; about

set 'DO NOT follow links if url contains' text box to below value

=http

Step 3 After doing above settings now click on Next  -> in Extraction Pattern window -> Click on Define ->  in Web Page Address (URL) give any URL where email is given.  and click on  + sign right of Date Fields to define scraping pattern.

Now inside HTML Structure selects HTML check box or Body check box which means for each page it will take whole page content to parse data.

Now last settings to extract emails from page using regular expression based email extraction function.  Open Predefined Script window and select ‘Extract_Email_Addresses‘ and click on OK. and if you have used page that contains email then in Script Result’ you will be able to see the harvested email.

Hope this will help you to use your Web Content Extractor as a Email Scraper.. Share your view in comment.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/use-web-content-extractor-as-email-scraper/