“Who owns the information, he owns the world” is a simple truth, without which it is impossible to become a successful businessman. It is very important to receive up-to-date data on market movements.
Nowadays, the amount of information has grown so much that it takes a huge amount of time to collect and process it. So, scraping/parsing was invented for the automatic collection and processing of large amounts of information.
Web scraping - what is it?
Web scraping is the collection of data from various Internet resources. The principle of operation is that the automated code executes GET requests to the target site and receives a response, parses an HTML document, searches for data and converts it to a given format.
The useful data category may include:
images;
video;
text content;
open contact details - email addresses, phone numbers, etc.
There are a large number of solutions in the field of web scraping, but you can have a lot of problems. For example:
No site has a perfect layout in terms of web design.
Most web developers write code for themselves or just as they can. Not always the code turns out high-quality. Often you can find a huge number of errors, including grammatical. All this makes the “self-written” code completely unreadable for scrapers.
The mass of web resources uses HTML5, where each element can be absolutely unique.
Some resources contain copy protection. For this, they usually use multi-level layout, JavaScript for rendering content, checking user-agent, etc.
In addition to useful blocks, a web page often contains excess information. For example, ads, comments, additional navigation items, etc.
The above factors make web scraping difficult. As a result, the quality of the content can drop up to 20%, which is a very bad result.
To solve this problem, there are special companies engaged in custom web scraping. Experience shows that it’s much more effective to turn to specialists, as it requires less resources.
If you have questions, we are always open to dialogue in the comments..