“While the door may seem intimidating at first, it’s a surprisingly straightforward project.” That is exactly what web scraping seems to be.
Web scraping, as an effective data collection method, has been widely used in many scenarios. However, many non-technical people may still feel confused about the process.
Stop getting stuck in a spot where you know the practical method but don’t know how to get into the door. Today we will unveil the process of web scraping and show you how easy it can be with an easy-to-use scraper!
Understand your Projects
To start with any Web Scraping Project, the very first step is to understand your project outlines and its final goal.
Then comes Data on which you have to work while doing any Web-Scraping projects. The key concern is to understand “What kind of Data you need or desire to complete Web-Scraping projects in less time. By Data, I mean qualitative or quantitative data, structured data, unstructured data, the links, the HTML scripts, or the text.
- From what websites can you access this data? — Every website has a different structure or layout to deal with. That’s why always make sure that your web-scraping tool has all those features that can deal with different layouts. Even sometimes, the same website can have different layouts for their web pages which might need your manual attention as well to change settings again and again. To avoid such manual work, always ensure by checking the features of any automated tool that you are choosing for your web scraping projects.
- How large are the quantities you desire? — It is also the main thing to consider because not every efficient automated software is free out there. Some of them provide a good range up to which you can scrape for free as per your scraping project needs. One of the most efficient tools that provides free services as well is Octoparse which lets you scrape approx. 10K rows of data for free in one run and you can run as many times as you want to scrape even more. Other than this, it allows you to have 10 tasks that can be performed at the same time.
- In what way can you get the Data ?—Of course, there are plenty of web-scraping tools out there that will automate your web-scraping projects and you really don’t have to worry about writing complicated programming scripts to do so. Since not everyone is from a technical background who can write scraping scripts to perform web scraping projects, getting to know any efficient tool for scraping is a good thing. It’s time-saving for developers as well. The amazing automated tool for all your web scraping needs is Octoparse because of its easy-to-use interface & easy to understand features. You can scrape data for whatsoever purposes using this software.
Make full use of your data output
One may need to do web scraping projects for so many reasons, I am hereby mentioning a few, you might also end up needing data for any of the mentioned instances.
Write a Thesis
Writing a thesis in an effective way requires lots of data. It might be qualitative (considers words only) or quantitative (considers numbers). Qualitative includes observations, interviews, focus groups whereas quantitative includes surveys, tests, and existing databases.
Price monitoring
Price monitoring is another application that you can consider in terms of web scraping projects. Price monitoring is basically knowing your competitors, how they price their products, how your prices fit within your industry, and whether there are any differences/fluctuations that you can take benefit of. When it comes to mission-oriented important tasks like price monitoring, it’s important to ensure accuracy, obtain up-to-date information, and have the capacity for massive scale. By pricing your products accurately, you can ensure that your competitors aren’t wrecking you, which makes you more likely to steal customers.
It is a practice that every company should be doing and is a task that readily lends itself to automation. Here comes an efficient web scraping tool to perform such automated tasks by providing quality data at the same time at low cost, you can make use of Octoparse to be updated with prices in real-time and get updated data every single second.
Data Science Projects
As every Data Science enthusiast must know this basic thing, Data is everything in the Data Science field. Although there are many platforms that provide datasets but what about having requirement of data as per your or your companies personalized interest and you end up finding nothing related to your needs, here is the need for a Scraping tool, and again Octoparse is the best choice since scraping is not something that data scientists do but still if there is any requirement of scraping, you have golden chance to stand out by scraping data in just minutes using Octoparse.
Web Scraping tool to get the data
Use Octoparse because of the mentioned features:
Auto-detect function
If you are a newbie to this software and don’t know it’s working and how to set the settings or change the workflow. What you can do instead of selecting the data manually from the browser interface of the software is just click on the “Auto-detect” function and the scraping bot will scrape all the data listed according to its understanding. You can also remove or keep the attributes as per your choice. You will also get to see some settings in the pop-up panel for the next page or scroll down selection and for scraping data on the page that follows on click of the link.
Cloud running – high speed and large quantities
The best feature that they have given for scraping data in large amounts yet efficiently with high speed and low cost is to run data scraping on the cloud but for that some minimum amount would be charged. Even you don’t have to bother much about updating real-time data. If you buy a plan, they provide such facilities of scraping and real-time updating.
Strong and powerful support
Undoubtedly, they have covered articles around every possible application of web scraping with all the use cases that can happen while scraping. They have also covered how to deal with different layouts of websites and what settings to choose when struck on some stubborn layouts. Other than articles, they have covered almost every situation that can occur while scraping in the YouTube tutorials as well.
Built-in templates
Built-in templates are the best part where newbies can start to understand workflow and other parameters to start with their very first scraping project. The only thing that is required to do is open any of the templates and run it to see the workflow for a particular website. As you can see from the below screenshot, there are different categories in which they have covered templates and the page below is showing some popular templates. Other than that, this software continuously updates itself with newer templates too.
Octoparse Templates
Low cost
Although it’s free up to some limit which is going to be enough for many, still if you are not satisfied with the limited data in hand, you can also upgrade to any of the plans listed on the official site to be in a position to scrape more and do a lot of other things with your data.
Final Words
After looking at the features and the applications that it can handle, you must already know how powerful Octoparse is for your Scraping projects. So, what are you waiting for? Go and install this software and play around with it to make an effective web scraping project.
