Data Scraping

What is Data Scraping?

For the modern business owner, data scraping is a powerful business automation option, fueling the growth and success of their companies through increased productivity.

Data scraping is a method that empowers professionals with various tools to work with data – be it extracting, analyzing, or integrating. Leveraging its ability to efficiently extract data from multiple websites or extracting data from a legacy system when no API is available, data scraping is an efficient way to replace cumbersomely, and many times ineffective, programs or tasks humans are completing.

Two Types of Data Scraping

Web Scraping

Web scraping (or content scraping) is the main form of data scraping for business applications.

Its software automatically downloads webpages or resources, parses their coded information, and delivers it to companies for usage.

Meant for data analysis, acquisition, and research, web scraping has been around since the 2000s. Search engines used web scrapers called “Web Crawlers” to inspect the content and data of millions of websites.

Web scraping is comprehensive, customizable, and effective at collecting whatever modern web data your company requires for intelligent business decisions.

Screen Scraping

Unlike web scraping, screen scraping does not download and parse web sources. Instead, it analyzes visual interfaces—straight from the screen intended for the user—to scrape text, images, and other content, making it ideal for application-based analytics and research. It is also extremely useful for scanning outdated sources.

Screen scraping a system in its entirety is crucial for certain companies, especially when their data needs to be kept intact for long periods of time for regulatory or record-keeping purposes. Screen scraping is ideal for extracting data without accessing the source code, as many older CRM systems do not have their own built-in APIs. This makes scraping technology a powerful tool for migrations, due to its ability to access and export legacy data with a high level of accuracy.

What can Data Scraping do?

Web scraping is used to price, monitor, analyze, and assemble information in support of marketing efforts, content creation, or decision making.

Data scraping can serve as a powerful tool for staying ahead of business competition. For example, imagine a company invests funds into a promotion of their products to generate sales but doesn’t know a competitor is a step ahead of them by using business automation technology and a web scraper. The web scraper can swiftly identify their competitor’s new price soon after it comes online, enabling a quick response from competing business leaders.

Instant information updates and an ability to capitalize on opportunities enable companies to keep abreast of evolving business conditions and stay ahead of their competition. Business leaders and managers can rely on business automation technology to provide them with clear, organized data to consider during critical decision-making. Fully integrated within their company’s documentation systems of choice, data scraping technology ensures that business and market research has never been easier.

How can Data Scraping help you?

Whether you are upgrading your legacy system or want to further learn how to leverage the power of web or content scraping for your business, contact us today for a meeting on how this technology can help your business thrive.

Our team of software engineers and experts are customer-focused solution architects, ready to build a custom solution for your e-commerce/online business or enterprise. Together, we can simplify the process of upgrading your system or building a custom scraping tool for web development, data migration, marketing, or any other application.

Our team has helped clients navigate questions of investing vs spending on tech solutions, providing a number of services and solutions to help collaboratively create their own custom-made competitive advantage.

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