Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:

• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection

Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:

• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4860417

Data Collection - Make a Plan

Planning for the data collection activity provides a stable and reliable data collection process in the Measure phase.

A well-planned activity ensures that your efforts and costs will not be in vain. Data collection typically involves three phases: pre-collection, collection and post-collection.

Pre-collection activities: Goal setting and forming operational definitions are some of the pre-collection activities that form the basis for systematic and precise data collection.

1.  Setting goals and objectives: Goal setting and defining objectives is the most important part of the pre-collection phase.

It enables teams to give direction to the data to be collected. The plan includes description of the Six Sigma project being planned. It lists out specific data that is required for the further steps in the process.

If there are no specific details as to the data needs, the data collection activity will not be within scope - and may become irrelevant over a period of time.

The plan must mention the rationale of data being collected as well as the final utilization.

2.  Define operational definitions: The team must clearly define what and how data has to be collected. An operational definition of scope, time interval and the number of observations required is very important.

If it mentions the methodology to be used, it can act a very important guideline to all data collection team members.

An understanding of all applicable information can help ensure that there no misleading data is collected, which may be loosely interpreted leading to a disastrous outcome.

3.  Repeatability, stability and accuracy of data: The repeatability of the data being collected is very important.

This means that when the same operator undertakes that same activity on a later date, it should produce the same output. Additionally, it is reproducible if all operators reach the same outcome.

Measurement systems should be accurate and stable, such that outcomes are the same with similar equipment over a period of time.

The team may carry out testing to ensure that there is no reduction in these factors.

Collection Activity

After planning and defining goals, the actual data collection process starts according to plan. Going by the plan ensures that teams achieve expected results consistently and accurately.

Training can be undertaken so as to ensure that all data collection agents have a common understanding of data being collected. Black Belts or team leaders can look over the process initially to provide any support needed.

For data collection over a longer period, teams need to ensure regular oversight to ensure that no collection activities are overlooked.

Post collection activities

Once collection activities are completed, the accuracy and reliability of the data has to be reviewed.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Collection---Make-a-Plan&id=2792515

Things to Factor in while Choosing a Data Extraction Solution

Things to Factor in while Choosing a Data Extraction Solution

Customization options

You should consider how flexible the solution is when it comes to changing the data points or schema as and when required. This is to make sure that the solution you choose is future-proof in case your requirements vary depending on the focus of your business. If you go with a rigid solution, you might feel stuck when it doesn’t serve your purpose anymore. Choosing a data extraction solution that’s flexible enough should be given priority in this fast-changing market.

Cost

If you are on a tight budget, you might want to evaluate what option really does the trick for you at a reasonable cost. While some costlier solutions are definitely better in terms of service and flexibility, they might not be suitable for you from a cost perspective. While going with an in-house setup or a DIY tool might look less costly from a distance, these can incur unexpected costs associated with maintenance. Cost can be associated with IT overheads, infrastructure, paid software and subscription to the data provider. If you are going with an in-house solution, there can be additional costs associated with hiring and retaining a dedicated team.

Data delivery speed

Depending on the solution you choose, the speed of data delivery might vary hugely. If your business or industry demands faster access to data for the survival, you must choose a managed service that can meet your speed expectations. Price intelligence, for example is a use case where speed of delivery is of utmost importance.

Dedicated solution

Are you depending on a service provider whose sole focus is data extraction? There are companies that venture into anything and everything to try their luck. For example, if your data provider is also into web designing, you are better off staying away from them.

Reliability

When going with a data extraction solution to serve your business intelligence needs, it’s critical to evaluate the reliability of the solution you are going with. Since low quality data and lack of consistency can take a toll on your data project, it’s important to make sure you choose a reliable data extraction solution. It’s also good to evaluate if it can serve your long-term data requirements.

Scalability

If your data requirements are likely to increase over time, you should find a solution that’s made to handle large scale requirements. A DaaS provider is the best option when you want a solution that’s salable depending on your increasing data needs.

When evaluating options for data extraction, it’s best keep these points in mind and choose one that will cover your requirements end-to-end. Since web data is crucial to the success and growth of businesses in this era, compromising on the quality can be fatal to your organisation which again stresses on the importance of choosing carefully.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/choosing-a-data-extraction-service-provider

7 Best Web Scraping Software tools to Acquire Data Without Coding

Ever since the world wide web started growing in terms of data size and quality, businesses and data enthusiasts have been looking for methods to extract this data from the web. Today, there are various ways to acquire data from websites of your preference. Some are meant for hobbyists and some are suitable for enterprises. DIY web scraping software belong the former category. If you need data from a few websites of your choice for a quick research or project, these tools are more than enough. DIY web scraping tools are much easier to use in comparison to programming your own web scraping setup. Here are some of the best web scraping software available in the market right now.

best web scraping software

1. Outwit Hub
Outwit hub is a Firefox extension that can be easily downloaded from the Firefox add-ons store. Once installed and activated, it gives web scraping capabilities to your browser. Out of the box, it has data points recognition features that can make your scraping job easier. Extracting data from sites using Outwit hub doesn’t demand programming skills. The set up is fairly easy to learn. You can refer to our guide on using Outwit hub to get started with web scraping using the tool. As it is free of cost, it makes for a great option if you need to scrape some data from the web quickly.

2. Web Scraper Chrome Extension
Web scraper is a great alternative to Outwit hub which is available for Google Chrome that can be used for web scraping. It lets you set up a sitemap (plan) on how a website should be navigated and what data should to be extracted. It can scrape multiple pages simultaneously and even has dynamic data extraction capabilities. Web scraper can also handle pages with JavaScript and Ajax, which makes it all the more powerful. The tool lets you export the extracted data to a CSV file. The only downside to web scraper extension is that it doesn’t have many automation features built in. Learn how to use web scraper to extract data from the web.

3. Spinn3r
Spinn3r is a great choice for scraping entire data from blogs, news sites, social media and RSS feeds. Spinn3r uses firehose API that manages 95% of the crawling and indexing work. It gives you the option to filter the data that it scrapes using keywords, which helps in weeding out irrelevant content. The indexing system of Spinn3r is similar to Google and saves the extracted data in JSON format. Spinn3r works by continuously scanning the web and updating their data sets. It has an admin console packed with features that lets you perform searches on the raw data. Spinn3r is an ideal solution if your data requirements are limited to media websites.

4. Fminer
Fminer is one of the easiest to use web scraping tools out there that combines top-in-class features. Its visual dashboard makes extracting data from websites as simple and intuitive as possible. Whether you want to scrape data from simple web pages or carry out complex data fetching projects that require proxy server lists, ajax handling and multi-layered crawls, Fminer can do it all. If your web scraping project is fairly complex, Fminer is the software you need.

5. Dexi.io
Dexi.io is a web based scraping application that doesn’t require any download. It is a browser based tool that lets you set up crawlers and fetch data in real-time. Dexi.io also has features that will let you save the scraped data directly to Box.net and Google drive or export it as JSON or CSV files. It also supports scraping the data anonymously using proxy servers. The data you scrape will be hosted on their servers for up to 2 weeks before it’s archived.

6. ParseHub
Parsehub is a web scraping software that supports complicated data extraction from sites that use AJAX, JavaScript, redirects and cookies. It is equipped with machine learning technology that can read and analyse documents on the web to output relevant data. Parsehub is available as a desktop client for windows, mac and linux and there is also a web app that you can use within the browser. You can have up to 5 crawl projects with the free plan from Parsehub.


7. Octoparse
Octoparse is a visual web scraping tool that is easy to configure. The point and click user interface lets you teach the scraper how to navigate and extract fields from a website. The software mimics a human user while visiting and scraping data from target websites. Octoparse gives the option to run your extraction on the cloud and on your own local machine. You can export the scraped data in TXT, CSV, HTML or Excel formats.

Tools vs Hosted Services
Although web scraping tools can handle simple to moderate data extraction requirements, these are not a recommended solution if you are a business trying to acquire data for competitive intelligence or market research. When the requirement is large-scale and/or complicated, web scraping tools fail to live up to the expectations. DIY tools can be the right choice if your data requirements are limited and the sites you are looking to scrape are not complicated. If you need enterprise-grade data, outsourcing the requirement to a DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) provider would be the ideal option. Dedicated web scraping services will take care of end-to-end data acquisition and will deliver the required data, the way you need it.

If your data requirement demands a custom built set up, a DIY tool cannot cover it. For example, if you need product data of the best selling products from Amazon at a predefined frequency, you will have to consult a web scraping provider instead of using a software. With a software, the customization options are limited and automation is almost non-existent. Tools also come with the downside of maintenance, which can be a daunting task. A scraping service provider will set up monitoring for the target websites and make sure that the scraping setup is well maintained. The flow of data will be smooth and consistent with a hosted solution.

Source url :-https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/best-web-scraping-software-tools-extract-data

How Data Mining Has Shaped The Future Of Different Realms

The work process of data mining is not exactly what its name suggests. In contrast to mere data extraction, it's a concept of data analysis and extracting out important and subject centred knowledge from the given data. Huge amounts of data is currently available on every local and wide area network. Though it might not appear, but parts of this data can be very crucial in certain respects. Data mining can aid one in moldings one's strategies effectively, therefore enhancing an organisation's work culture, leading it towards appreciable growth.

Below are some points that describe how data mining has revolutionised some major realms.

Increase in biomedical researches

There has been a speedy growth in biomedical researches leading to the study of human genetic structure, DNA patterns, improvement in cancer therapies along with the disclosure of factors behind the occurrence of certain fatal diseases. This has been, to an appreciable extent. Data scraping led to the close examination of existing data and pick out the loopholes and weak points in the past researches, so that the existing situation can be rectified.

Enhanced finance services

The data related to finance oriented firms such as banks is very much complete, reliable and accurate. Also, the data handling in such firms is a very sensitive task. Faults and frauds might also occur in such cases. Thus, scraping data proves helpful in countering any sort of fraud and so is a valuable practice in critical situations.

Improved retail services

Retail industries make a large scale and wide use of web scraping. The industry has to manage abundant data based on sales, shopping history of customers, input and supply of goods and other retail services. Also, the pricing of goods is a vital task. Data mining holds huge work at this place. A study of degree of sales of various products, customer behaviour monitoring, the trends and variations in the market, proves handy in setting up prices for different products, bringing up the varieties as per customers' preferences and so on. Data scraping refers to such study and can shape future customer oriented strategies, thereby ensuring overall growth of the industry.

Expansion of telecommunication industry

The telecom industry is expanding day by day and includes services like voicemail, fax, SMS, cellphone, e- mail, etc. The industry has gone beyond the territorial foundations, including services in other countries too. In this case, scraping helps in examining the existing data, analyses the telecommunication patterns, detect and counter frauds and make better use of available resources. Scraping services generally aims to improve the quality of service, being provided to the users.

Improved functionality of educational institutes

Educational institutes are one of the busiest places especially the colleges providing higher education. There's a lot of work regarding enrolment of students in various courses, keeping record of the alumni, etc and a large amount of data has to be handled. What scraping does here is that it helps the authorities locate the patterns in data so that the students can be addressed in a better way and the data can be presented in a tidy manner in future.

Article Source: https://ezinearticles.com/?How-Data-Mining-Has-Shaped-The-Future-Of-Different-Realms&id=9647823

Benefits with Web Data Scraping Services

Web scraping in simple words is that you can extract data from any website and it is quite similar to web harvesting.

Online business has become so popular due to the increase in number of internet users. One of the main benefits of online business is that it is cheap and it is easily accessible. This has become very tough and a competitive field. Hence it is important that each should exhibit high performance in order to survive here. Today most of the online business depends on web data scraping for better performance.

The benefits with web data scraping services are:

•    An unstructured data can be transformed into suitable form and it can be stored as spreadsheet or as a database
•    It provides data which are informational
•    Some of the websites provide free access and hence you can save money
•    It helps to save time and energy. If it is done by manpower, it will take more time to do because they need to go through the websites and that can be time consuming.
•    The results provided are accurate. It will provide the exact result required instead of providing the related data.

With web scraping benefits you can scrape any kind of data without much trouble and can be delivered in whichever format you like MYSQL, EXCEL, CSV, XML etc. All you need to do is suggest the website from where you require the data.

So whether your business is big or small you can rely on these web scraping services for getting different types of data scraping. With web scraping you can even know the upcoming market and trends. You can even assume the strategies and plans of your competitor. This helps to take important decision at an appropriate time. This is an important step in any business whether it is big or small. Some of the companies even offer free trial service offer. You don’t need to make the payment in advance. When the work is done and if you are completely satisfied only then you need to do the payment.

Most of the companies use advanced data scraping tools and provides quality services. So you can be assured that the money you are paying is worthwhile. The information that you give to them will be kept strictly confidential. You can absolutely trust these companies for your business requirements.

To discuss web data scraping requirement, email at info@www.web-scraping-services.com.

Source Url :-http://3idatascraping.weebly.com/blog/benefits-with-web-data-scraping-services

Web Scraping Techniques

Web Scraping Techniques

There can be various ways of accessing the web data. Some of the common techniques are using API, using the code to parse the web pages and browsing. The use of API is relevant if the site from where the data needs to be extracted supports such a system from before. Look at some of the common techniques of web scraping.

1. Text greping and regular expression matching

It is an easy technique and yet can be a powerful method of extracting information or data from the web. However, the web pages then need to be based on the grep utility of the UNIX operating system for matching regular expressions of the widely used programming languages. Python and Perl are some such programming languages.

2. HTTP programming

Often, it can be a big challenge to retrieve information from both static as well as dynamic web pages. However, it can be accomplished through sending your HTTP requests to a remote server through socket programming. By doing so, clients can be assured of getting accurate data, which can be a challenge otherwise.

3. HTML parsers

There are few data query languages in a semi-structured form that are capable of including HTQL and XQuery. These can be used to parse HTML web pages thus fetching and transforming the content of the web.

4. DOM Parsing

When you use web browsers like Mozilla or Internet Explorer, it is possible to retrieve contents of dynamic web pages generated by client scripting programs.

5. Reorganizing the semantic annotation

There are some web scraping services that can cater to web pages, which embrace metadata markup or semantic. These may be meant to track certain snippets. The web pages may embrace the annotations and can be also regarded as DOM parsing.
Setup or configuration needed to design a web crawler

The below-mentioned steps refer to the minimum configuration, which is required for designing a web scraping solution.

HTTP Fetcher– The fetcher extracts the web pages from the site servers targeted.

Dedup– Its job is to prevent extracting duplicate content from the web by making sure that the same text is not retrieved multiple times.

Extractor– This is a URL retrieval solution to fetch information from multiple external links.

URL Queue Manager– This queue manager puts the URLs in a queue and assigns a priority to the URLS that needs to be extracted and parsed.

Database– It is the place or the destination where data after being extracted by a web scraping tool is stored to process or analyze further.

Advantages of Data as a Service Providers

Outsourcing the data extraction process to a Data Services provider is the best option for businesses as it helps them focus on their core business functions. By relying on a data as a service provider, you are freed from the technically complicated tasks such as crawler setup, maintenance and quality check of the data. Since DaaS providers have expertise in extracting data and a pre-built infrastructure and team to take complete ownership of the process, the cost that you would incur will be significantly less than that of an in-house crawling setup.

Key advantages:

- Completely customisable for your requirement
- Takes complete ownership of the process
- Quality checks to ensure high quality data
- Can handle dynamic and complicated websites
- More time to focus on your core business

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/commercial-web-data-extraction-services-enterprise-growth