When a company wants to be competitive and successful, it must know the competition and the market using the most suitable technology tools like free web scraper.
The information on the Internet can make a business grow or get the consumption trends of a social group or region, among other things.
However, this information gets mixed up on web pages, and it’s hard to get to if you don’t have a dedicated app.
This is where web scraping becomes essential among business techniques to keep up with changing market speeds and trends.
What is web scraping?
Although the concept is very new and innovative, its proper use has evolved since its appearance at the beginning of using the same web in the 90s. web scraping or web harvesting (data extracting or scraping on the web for its English translation) is a technique for automatically collecting structured information on web pages.
This data mining refers to collecting specific data from websites via their HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) protocol or simply using their browser with copy and paste technique.
The information that can be extracted from web pages varies widely, even more so with the incorporation of the cloud as a repository for large and nearly unlimited data.
This information may be relevant to areas or businesses such as price monitoring, economic value intelligence, data monitoring, lead capture and market research, etc.
These companies use the data of people, products, or companies publicly displayed on the web to make more intelligent and more accurate decisions in their business.
Web scraping element
Data extraction has been carried out since the advent of web pages, but with the advancement of technology, tools, and even software, robots have been created that are responsible for this task.
On the cybersecurity portal, they point out that this web scraping is done with two elements: a web crawler and a web scraper.
A tracker is a vehicle that moves from one web page to another, and a scraper is a container where the extracted information is placed.
The crawler moves the scraper through the Internet, extracting the requested data.
Tracker
A web crawler, also known as a “spider,” is an artificial intelligence tasked with scouring the Internet to index and search for content by following links and browsing.
After obtaining the information about the destination programmed in the robot’s intelligence, it passes the control to the scraper.
Scraper
A web scraper or scraper is a unique application created to extract data from web pages accurately and quickly.
Web scrapers can vary in design or complexity depending on the purpose or target of the data or the company and project you have.
There is a critical session in programming this scraper: a data finder (or selector) is used to find the desired information from the HTML file.
A simple example of data scraping or web scraping is: consulting a web page for the sale of an item or product, where the one you select appears along with other similar data that varies in some characteristics or prices.
If you decide to analyze this information further, you can copy it and then paste it into a spreadsheet to compile and analyze this data and make the best decision.
Unlike this manual procedure, web scraping uses intelligent automation tools to extract millions of data simultaneously from the Internet.
In this case, specialized search engine robots crawl the website, analyze its content, and rank it.
That is why market research firms, for example, use scrapers or scrapers to extract data from forums and social networks and thus can perform opinion analysis.
