Semalt: What You Need To Know About Scraper Sites
Web scraping is widely used to extract information from career-based social network websites to find the right candidate for specific job vacancies. Searching for available job vacancies in the job markets using web scraping is recommended than filling applications and sending them to recruiters. There are thousands of reasons to extract data from the web rather than just using websites for browsing reasons.
What is a scraper site?
In the current online marketing industry, the web is the most significant source of useful data. Websites display data in one format or the other. This is where web data extraction comes in. As a marketer, you have to gather data from multiple web sources for analysis. With the current web scraping tools, you can easily extract vast amounts of data from web pages and export the data to CouchDB or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
To boost users' engagement and generate external traffic, you need to post fresh and original content to your website. A website that features information extracted from other websites and presented to the end users as fresh and unique is termed as a scraper site. These sites obtain data from e-commerce websites for republishing, market analysis, and research purposes.
Web scraping ethics
Web scraping is the technique of retrieving data in vast amounts from unstructured formats and exporting the data in well-documented forms that can be easily read by your site potential visitors. However, most of the e-commerce websites use "don't allow" directives in their robots.txt configuration file to discourage web scrapers from scraping their sites. Scraping content from dynamic sites that disallows you from scraping is termed as illegal and can land you in big trouble.
You don't need to hire thousands or millions of professionals to copy-paste content from web pages. Site scrapers are automated web data extraction tools that collect huge amounts of target information from the web pages. Obtained data can easily be exported into spreadsheets. Note that you can export scraped content into CouchDB for advanced web scraping projects.
Uses of web scraping
Web scrapers extract data from e-commerce websites for various purposes. To track down the performance of your competitors in the financial markets, you need access to comprehensive and accurate data. Here is a list of the standard web scraping uses.
- Research
Data plays an integral role in marketing, scientific, and academic research. With an efficient web scraper, you can extract huge amounts of data from multiple sources in a structured format.
- Price comparison
Online stores rely on comprehensive and accurate data to compare prices of products and services offered by other companies offering the same line of products. Web scrapers help online store owners to gather huge amounts of data for price comparison and to improve customer relations.
- Leads generation
Site scrapers can be used to extract contact details of individuals and organizations from e-commerce websites. Credentials like phone numbers, website URLs, and email address can be retrieved from sites and republished into scraper sites.
Scraping a site to create a contact list can be easy. However, building a contact list from thousands of sites that are constantly updating can be a cumbersome task. Web data extraction is the ultimate solution to obtaining clean, reliable, and consistent data from the web.