Web Scraping is described as a relatively new technology that allows businesses to collect essential data that are particular to their businesses. These collected data can be used to make informed business decisions that will improve the overall quality of performance and productivity.
Data scraping has contributed immensely to various aspects of online businesses including Shopping API. While the importance of data cannot be overstated, there are certain doubts about web scraping and data collection, especially as some industries and professionals debate the legality of the process.
The confusion as to the legality of web scraping services needs to be addressed, especially as business owners are now in search of answers to the questions on their minds.
To help you make a valuable business decision for your business goals and objectives, below are answers to some of the common questions regarding web scraping.
1. What can Web Scraping be Used For?
Most business owners are interested in new technologies so long as these technologies promise returns and a significantly positive impact. Web scraping, being a new technology, offers business owners an opportunity to collect valuable data and make valuable business decisions based on the data collected. However, most business owners wonder if this service can contribute to their need for lead generation.
While web scraping has the chance of contributing to lead generation, this may not be an entirely fruitful path as most people submit an email address which they do not check often to websites. This is not to say that there aren’t a certain percentage of emails that could potentially generate leads.
2. Is Web Scraping Legal?
The legality of web scraping has come into question over time. To put things simply, web scraping is as legal as viewing a website or webpage from your browser. With most websites on the web supporting web crawling services, the legality of the process is further reinforced. However, it is important for web crawling and web scraping service providers to stay updated regarding whether the target website is one that supports being crawled or otherwise.
3. Can Highly Popular Websites like LinkedIn and/or Facebook be Crawled?
Highly popular websites have data that many people are interested in. However, in most cases, these websites put in place mechanisms and measures that are designed to block automated web crawling services. Crawling these websites may lead to a legal dispute, especially for those websites that have gone to great lengths to ensure that web scraping and data collection are barred.
4. What is the Best Web Scraping Tool to Use?
It is quite an enormous and almost impossible task to build a one size fits all web scraping tool. However, users can choose between the DIY web scraping tools and the Data As A Service (DaaS) providers. I have designed most DIY web scraping tools for small data extraction uses and come with some requirements such as maintenance. This is circumvented by choosing a DaaS provider. With a DaaS provider, problems encountered when scaling up for DIY web scraping tools can be avoided.
5. Can a Website like Twitter be Crawled?
Yes. However, Twitter has its own API through which it makes tweet data available to users. A web scraping company that is interested in the data can build a program that automates the process of data extraction. Data collected from websites like Twitter can be used for a number of purposes.
6. Is it Possible to Extract Data from the Entire web?
There are millions of websites on the internet and this makes it a lot more complex for such a feat to be achieved. Taking into consideration the various specifics associated with websites, it is quite impossible to scrape data from all the websites across the web. The most popular search engine, Google, also finds it hard to crawl a significant portion of the internet.
7. Can Data be Extracted from Multilingual Websites?
Yes, however, there may be some problems posed by language differences. For multilingual websites, there may be some discrepancies in the collected data, especially if you are unfamiliar with the language. Data fields may be different from the native language you are familiar with and this may significantly affect the integrity of the data collected.
8. Can Data Behind a Login Page be Scraped?
Yes. However, this will require that you have a valid login to such a website. The web scraper works exactly as it would on any other website once a successful login has been initiated.
