Thursday, November 10, 2016

Scraping the Web in Competitive Marketing



The dawn of the internet era brought a massive amount of people (and data) only at a click’s distance through websites. Every connected user leaves an online footprint and adds to the scattered raw data which requires an expert analysis before it could be used as information. The web pages as a structured document allow those gazillions of pages to be used information data sets. It was this gargantuan volume of information that replaced the use of ad-hoc software users with bots unless the website explicitly prevents it.

Web Scraping tools sieve out data from the web pages in a format entirely based on our requirements and leaves the structure of the document unscathed. With Big Data becoming the future that will affect all the industries, websites as an abundant source of data have become the most lucrative part of the deal.

As the data may update dynamically, most of the extensions and tools look out for these changes and web crawling software and browser extensions. Static information can also be stored offline in various formats (CSV, JSON) for unlimited access.
update the results automatically. Depending on the parser used in the scraping tool, the data can be exported into a format that allows improved visibility. Now when nary of the sites are written in pure HTTP, developers have to focus on handling multitudes of processes and calls made by scripting languages like JavaScript- which itself is backed well by a large no. of libraries that provide loads of functionality, handle Ajax calls and also maintain session cookies. This increased up the demand for both advanced standalone

Web crawlers, or bots, can essentially be an alternative term for scraping albeit defining themselves physically as well. These bots use the sitemap to crawl or navigate the site to extract the data. The parser can identify and select the tags of different type and mine them categorically.


Competitor Price Monitoring

A Noble tool for a fierce world

Of the most immediate applications, Competitor Price Monitoring is the hottest areas where web scraping services are employed. With rapid market extension and outreach thanks to improved digital services via numerous competitive e-commerce services, the game that is business has changed. competitor price monitoring solutions provide comprehensive competitor statistics, from tracking price fluctuations in related products, categorizing the price ranges along extended periods of time, to predicting the product behavior in the market based on the company’s history and trending-to-upcoming factors that influence the consumer’s and competitor’s online activities. This hugely improves the strategizing policies as companies can observe and assess their market performance in real time.
Easier business terms and improved entrepreneurial environment has thrown a lot of competitors in the field, creating an unprecedented competition among the various branches of manufacturing and services sector. With a vast myriad of options available, it comes naturally not only for the consumers but also for the enterprises to monitor the options available for the users in the parallel marketplace. This has converted even the task of comparison into a competitive market itself. Professional