Use Cases for Web Scraping

Automated data extraction from websites is known as web scraping. It is possible to analyze and process any publicly accessible web page. You can then use this data outside of the original website by downloading or storing them. But firstly, you should know what are the use cases for web scraping.

Knowledge and data can be found on the web in unprecedented amounts. Humans, not machines, are meant to process that information. For example, video and audio files are present in great amounts and are regularly scraped. You can use web scraping to give computers the ability to access these data efficiently and format it in an easily readable way. In itself, the amount of data on the web is too much for humans to comprehend. For example, YouTube processes 30.000 hours of new video every hour according to Statista. Because of this, web scraping is becoming increasingly important.

Use Cases

You can collect structured data by scraping web pages. A structured data set is simply a way of saying that the information is easily read or processed by computers. Computers are capable of rapidly using the data from web pages in a number of unexpected and useful ways instead of humans reading or processing them.

Take for example the difficulty of manually copying and pasting text from 500 web pages. Providing the machine with the correct instructions would allow it to do it in less than a second. It can also accomplish this in a constant, relentless manner and at any scale. In the time it takes you to open just a few pages, a computer could handle one million pages.

Market Research

One of the most important use cases for web scraping is Market Research. In order to be successful, business endeavors must start with accurate and relevant information. The web provides a vast amount of information about consumers, competitors, and your industry. You should take advantage of it to learn more about both current and prospective customers.

• Transportation and lodging. Monitor information on the accommodation provided by sites such as Booking and Airbnb. Consider change-ups in listings, up-to-date pricing, and accommodation types to identify patterns throughout the year and maximize your returns.
• Social Media. Assess growth potential and optimize marketing strategies by gathering feedback from Twitter and Instagram.
• Automotive. You can identify the popularity of different brands and models by scanning offers from dealers and car sales portals.
• Real Estate. In order to gain insight into the market, gather listings from real estate websites.
• Industry. Are you looking for the perfect location for your new restaurant? Find out where your business, warehouse, or store should be located based on competitors or business listings.

Price Comparison

In real-time and simultaneously, scraping enables you to keep an eye on millions of products on millions of websites. Make adjustments to your pricing strategy or create a comparison site using this information.

• Price Tracking. Keep an eye on the products in your competitors’ online stores. Optimize your revenue by automatically adjusting your prices.
• Product Tracking. Find out if certain keywords are present in an item. A download of all pages containing a certain keyword is automatically performed. Your new venture should be based on that information to determine when to launch it.

Lead Generation

Modern organizations use consumer behavior data to get to the heart of opportunities and challenges, from customer acquisition to customer retention and loyalty. Web scraping technology can work to your advantage so you can generate leads more quickly and with greater accuracy.

• Contact information. You can identify and obtain accurate and relevant contact information by collecting and processing multiple levels of data. Obtain useful addresses and phone numbers from yellow pages like business listing sites.
• Get customers from social media. Identifying new consumers and collecting information about existing ones can be accomplished by following metadata tags on social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
• Get business leads. Identify and invest in the most promising global startups by finding the extraordinary companies and the people behind them.

Machine Learning

One of the most prominent use cases for web scraping is Machine Learning. As the problem and algorithm become more complicated, the dataset becomes larger. Make good use of the enormous amount of publicly available free data on the Internet to train your models and feed them.

• Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). Using natural language data like reviews, develop a program for processing and analyzing large volumes. You can, for example, check the reviews of a particular restaurant on the web or find your favorite app’s reviews in the Google Play Store.
• Recognizing images. Image recognition is an important part of many technological innovations today. Whether it is for self-driving cars, diagnostic imaging software, or just face-unlocking our smartphones, you need a lot of images.
• Information aggregation. By crawling news sites worldwide, you can update and train your models. Thus, gather up-to-date intelligence, track public sentiment, and identify relationships.

Headhunting

Does your company face a difficult challenge when it comes to attracting top talent? A recruiter’s job is rarely easy, no matter how well-known your company is or how great the benefits are. Nevertheless, using extracted data to gain a better understanding of the job market could make work easier.

As an example, if you are looking for a network engineer, the first step would be to check out other positions available. You can scrape job portals, add the relevant data to a single file, and combine everything together. You will know what you need to beat to hire the best and brightest in your team by examining the information, such as offered wages, benefits, job descriptions, and so on.

In particular, this recruiting strategy is advantageous for large corporations, which are able to hire employees in different locations based on where the best candidates are located. Also, the other option is to scrape through Linkedin or other sites that feature professional profiles on your own.

Conclusion

Business and personal requirements can both benefit from web scraping. The requirements for gathering data vary from business to business or from individual to individual.

You should take the time to learn more about data extraction. I hope that I sparked your interest. Therefore, it is time to check out what the web scraping market has to offer and see what appeals to you. Apify or Scraper API are excellent options to consider regardless of your reasons or use cases for web scraping. Take a look now at these extraordinary tools!