If
you are running a business, you will need to monitor how your competitor is doing.
When you monitor competitor product prices, you will then be able to set prices
that put you at an advantage. Web scraping, also called web data extraction,
allows you to get this information. You could do the web scraping yourself,
but hiring professional web scraping services has more benefits.
Different
website admins employ different techniques to slow down and stop bots. These
include blocking IP addresses, disabling web service APIs that the site’s
system might expose, excess traffic monitoring and commercial anti-bot services.
Others are using CSS sprites for the display of phone number, email address and
other information, Web application firewalls, CAPCHA, using robot.txt and using
honey pot and other method to identify automated crawler IP addresses. A
professional will know how to go around these measures.
A
professional understands the legal issues around monitoring competitor prices using web scraping. A professional will interpret the
terms of use of the website you want to mine data from and this will allow you
to make an informed decision. It is important that you be discrete when monitoring
competitor prices and a professional will advice you on how to go about the
process incognito.
Different
techniques are used in web scraping and most are very complicated. Unless you
have specialized skills and experience, you will need a trained and experienced
professional to monitor competitor product prices. These techniques include text grepping & regular
expression matching, HTTP programming where HTTP requests are posted on remote
web servers using socket programming, HTML parsers, vertical aggregation
platforms, semantic annotation recognizing and DOM parsing.
There
are several web scraping software programs in the market. Hiring a professional
for the task is important because he/she will know the best software. These
software tools need customization to get exactly what you are looking for and
only a trained and experienced professional will be able to do this. Custom scraping services will ensure
you get the data you want whereas automatic web scraping might give you data
you do not need.
A
professional knows exactly what is available in different websites and where it
is found. This visualization is important when using computer vision web-page
analyzers for custom scraping services.
In
some situations, human copy-and-paste is the most effective web scraping
technique. Hiring web scraping services in
such cases is important because this is a tiring and time consuming exercise
that will interfere with your business. When you hire a professional, your
whole team gets to concentrate on running the business. Most companies offering
custom scraping services have an
online presence, giving you cost benefits, anonymity and convenience. A
professional will also give you tips on other methods that you could use to get
the data you need.
