Semalt Review: What Is Web Scraping

1. 23.05.2018 Semalt Review: What Is Web Scraping? Web scraping is the process of gathering information from the web. However, data is gathered for different purposes. Extraction robots help to automate the process of gathering information from the web faster and more accurately. So, web scrapers save you a lot of time that can be spent into other activities. Examples of web scraping As an illustration of how useful web scraping robots are, take a sales team for instance. To get good leads, they may need to do some cold calling. But how do they get the numbers of whom to call? It is a good idea to search a directory to pull out numbers. Do you know how many hours will be spent just to get the phone numbers of a tangible number of prospective customers? It can be time-consuming and frustrating. This is where a web scraper comes in handy. You can program it to extract certain information from a particular list on the web. You can build a dexi.io robot to search a directory of public listed companies and extract contacts like https://rankexperience.com/articles/article2194.html 1/3

2. 23.05.2018 phone numbers and email addresses. This is just a simple illustration. Web scrapers can be applied to different data gathering tasks. Price comparison sites also make use of web scraping robots to extract prices of different products like smartphones, hotels, credit cards, and insurance just to mention a few. In fact, some comparison sites also scrape data from another comparison sites. In other words, price comparison is another reason for web scraping. To be ahead of your competitors, you need to have access to the data that only very few people have access to. This is why some companies have built thousands of robots looking for rare but bene?cial information. In sport betting, the more data you have than other bettors, the better your odds. In fact, having more information than your bookmakers gives you a competitive edge over them. For instance, if countries A and B are about to have a football match, and country A has beaten B in 80 percent of their total encounters, most bettors will put their stake on country A. But if the venue for the match is in Country B, and you and only a few other bettors found out that A has never beaten B in the latter's home before, you will wager on B, and the fact that most bettors went in favor of country A will even give you more money if you win. That is the simple advantage of having access to more data than others. It makes you limit your risk and also maximize your pro?t. Web scraping is also a useful research tool Researchers also make use of web scrapers for their activities. Universities, NGOs, and Governments also make use of web scraping. Some extracted data is essential for some purposes like monitoring the state of the Earth, building robotic cars, and even for AI-driven inventions. How to begin with web scraping Since dexi.io has built a great easy-to-use data extraction tool, you can begin by learning how to use the tool. It is very effective for data re?ning, web crawling, and web scraping. While machines need data to exist, dexi.io helps to process the data to machines. Getting started now In the course of embarking on your ?rst web scraping, you should use the terms external data processing or data research to avoid ambiguity. You also need to break down the intelligence behind your algorithm and data on paper. Most importantly, since this is your ?rst time, you should be prepared to fail, learn from your mistakes and improve. The earlier you start, the better. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article2194.html 2/3

3. 23.05.2018 Try it for free You can sign up and try the tool for free. To put it in the simplest form, a data scraping robot does a task that will take a thousand people several years to complete. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article2194.html 3/3