The World Wide Web is a treasure trove of data. The availability of big data, rapid growth in data analysis software, and increasingly cheap computing power have further increased the importance of data-driven strategies for competitive differentiation. According to a Forrester report, data-driven companies that leverage and implement corporate insights to create competitive advantage are growing at an average annual rate of over 30% and are expected to generate $1.8 trillion in revenue by 2021. McKinsey research shows that companies that tap into insights into customer behavior have 85% higher sales growth and 25% higher gross margins than their peers. However, the Internet provides content regularly and continuously. This can cause confusion when looking for data related to requirements. At this point, web scraping helps to extract useful data that meets requirements and preferences.
Therefore, the following basics can help you understand how to use web scraping to gather information and how to use proxy servers effectively.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping or web collection is the technology of extracting relevant requirements and large amounts of data from web pages. This information is stored in a spreadsheet on the local computer. This is very far-sighted for companies to plan their marketing strategies based on the data they have obtained. Web scraping enables enterprises to innovate quickly and access data on the World Wide Web in real time.
So if you’re an e-commerce company and you’re collecting data, a Web scraping application will help you download hundreds of pages of useful data from a competitor’s site without manual processing. Why is web scraping so beneficial? Web scraping removes the monotony of manually extracting data and overcomes the obstacles in its process. For example, there are sites where data cannot be copied and pasted. This is where web scraping comes in, helping to extract whatever type of data you need. You can also convert and save it to a format of your choice. When you extract web page data with web scraping tools, you will be able to save the data in CSV format, etc.
The data can then be retrieved, analyzed, and used as desired. Web fetching simplifies the process of data extraction and speeds up the process by automating it. And easy access to extracted data in CSV format.
Web scraping has many other benefits, such as its use for lead development, market research, brand monitoring, anti-counterfeiting activities and machine learning using large data sets. However, as long as web fetching is done within a reasonable range, proxy servers are highly recommended. Understanding agent management is critical to scaling web scraping projects, as it is at the heart of scaling all data extraction projects.
What is a proxy server?
The IP address is usually as follows: 289.9.879.15. When using the Internet, this combination of numbers is basically a label attached to a device that helps locate it. A proxy server is a third-party server that sends routing requests through its server and uses its IP server in the process. With a proxy server, the requesting web site no longer sees the IP address, but the IP address of the proxy server can extract web page data with greater security.
Benefits of using a proxy server
1. The use of proxy server can develop websites with higher reliability, thus reducing the situation that crawlers are banned or blocked.
2. Proxy servers enable you to make requests from a specific geographic area or device (such as mobile IPs) to help view the content displayed in a specific geographic area on a website. This is useful when extracting product data from online retailers.
3. Use proxy pools to make higher requests to target sites without being banned.
4. Proxy servers protect you from IP bans imposed by some websites. For example, requests from AWS servers are often blocked by the site because it keeps a record of the number of requests using AWS servers that overload the site.
5. A proxy server can be used for numerous concurrent sessions to the same or different web sites.
What are proxy options?
If you follow the basic principles of the proxy server, you can choose from three main IPs types. Each category has its advantages and disadvantages and serves a specific purpose well. Data center IPs This is the most common type of proxy IP.
They are IPs servers in data centers and they are very cheap. With the right agent management solution, it can be a solid foundation to build a powerful web capture solution for your business. Residential IPs These are private residential IPs that can be requested via residential network routing. They are harder to come by and therefore more expensive. Such IPs are financially difficult when similar results can be achieved with cheaper data center IPs. With a proxy server, scraping software can block their IP addresses with a residential IP proxy, giving the software access to all web sites that might not be accessible without a proxy.
Mobile IPs These are private mobile IPs. Because IPs for mobile devices are hard to come by, they are extremely expensive. It is not recommended unless the results to be captured are presented to mobile users. Legally, this is even more complicated, because in most cases the device owner has no idea that you are using their GSM network for web scraping. With proper agency management, data center IPs can produce results similar to residential IPs or mobile IPs without legal considerations and at low cost. Artificial intelligence in Web crawling Many studies show that artificial intelligence can solve the challenges and obstacles in web crawling.
Recently, MIT researchers published a paper on an artificial intelligence system that extracts information from web sources and learns how to do the job on its own. The research also introduces mechanisms to automatically extract structured data from unstructured sources, thus establishing a link between human analytical capabilities and artificial intelligence drives. This could be the future of filling human resource shortfalls, or eventually making it a completely AI-led process.
conclusion
Web scraping has always driven innovation and achieved breakthrough results from data-driven business strategies. However, it also has its own unique challenges, which reduce the likelihood and, in turn, make it more difficult to achieve the desired outcome. In the last decade alone, humanity has created more information than in all of human history. This requires more innovations like ARTIFICIAL intelligence, which institutionalize highly unstructured data patterns and open up greater possibilities.