Effective Data Mining Solutions
Our web scraping and data mining services will lay solid foundations for your business’s data project. From competitor analysis through to product analysis and social media research, data mining is the most effective way to collect information from existing sources online.
We can help you to robustly capture and store that data using state of the art web scraping tools.
Our Role As Your Web Scraping Agency
You will work directly with a web scraping consultant that will scope out your project and define a set of technical requirements.
All of your web scraping technology will be built top of AWS and Google Cloud Platform infrastructure.
How Our Web Scraping Service Works
1. Consultation
In our initial consultation, we’ll work to establish your data requirements by reviewing your niche, objectives and your current products/services.
Our assessment will look at how data can intersect with your current business models and also how it can help them grow and develop.
We understand that your requirements may range from scraping a handful of predetermined competitors for general information to scraping thousands of pages for intricate and specific data.
2. Free Data Sample
We offer free data samples to every prospective client in either JSON or CSV format. We provide only clean data ready for warehousing or piping downstream.
Our free data sample will give you an idea of how effective and precise proper data scraping can be and the value it can add to your business.
3. Pricing and Progress!
Based on data needs explored during your consultation, we will agree on a pricing structure and begin to implement architectures. You will have our full commitment throughout our project and we will be able to flex and adapt scrapers to meet new objectives.
Need Help With Your Web Scraping?
Let us help you to get the data you need to take your business to the next level.
Our Web Scraping Technology Stack
Scrapy
Scrapy is a superb Python-based web scraping framework. It’s customisable, scalable and highly flexible to perform either web crawling or web scraping tasks, or both.
Selenium
Selenium is primarily designed for automated front-end web application testing. However, it can dynamically render javascript and makes for a very flexible and powerful scraping tool that is perfectly suited to websites that dynamically render content.
Requests + BeautifulSoups + Asyncio
HTTP requests sent via Requests to BeautifulSoup for parsing can provide a rapid and slimline means to easily scrape standard webpages.
If there are a large number of pages to web scraping, then we will create asynchronous web scraping pipelines with asyncio.
Google Big Query
Google BigQuery is our preferred data lake for storing your web scraped data, it has a native data visualisation connector with Google Data Studio.
Data Transformation, Preparation and Maintenance
Our data engineering process transforms your data into the best possible format for use downstream.
We’ll help you translate your business problems into relevant data pipelines.
Why Should I Use Web Scraping Services?
Competitor Analysis
The first step towards beating your competitors is to learn about them. Web scraping provides an unparalleled means to discover valuable information about your competitors; who they are, their market position/share, their pricing structures and their marketing tactics.
A key element of this is price assessment. Scraping prices from Amazon, eBay, Alibaba and other sources, including competitor websites, allows you to strategise both your purchasing and selling. Purchase at the right time to save huge costs and sell optimally to make the greatest returns.
Content Analysis
Content scraping covers a vast array of topics ranging from scraping current affairs and archival news for stories and information, scraping social media to gauge reaction and mood and scraping product reviews and reactions. Scraping and analysing content provides you with a means of delving into your own brand and other brands to see the conversations the public are having and how they reflect on your brand and products. This allows you to monitor reactions to marketing and ad campaigns and adapt to comments and criticisms before they become too advanced or developed to deal with.
- Use sentiment analysis to discover the affective states and opinions of the public.
- Mine information from archived sources.
- Scrape news stories as they happen for journalistic purposes.
- Analyse social media for sentiments and trends.
Market Research
Market research assesses industries, brands and customer behaviours. Web scraping allows you to answer questions about your customers and audience without even asking them, you can use existing information to gauge whether or not there is a hunger for a particular idea, product or service. You can use this information to gauge how you’d target those who are discussing it online. Market research via web scraping doesn’t just illuminate key areas of your market, it also helps describe your customer; who they are, where they are and what they do.
- Discover purchase desires and intentions.
- Identify gaps in the market.
- Learn about how your market interacts with its customers.
Web Scraping Frequently Asked Questions
Is Web Scraping Allowed?
It depends on what you’re scraping and why. Web scraping as a process, or activity, is not illegal but the activities it entails, e.g. breaching privacy, can be. Scraping some personal information is prohibited by law, e.g. GDPR, which protects the privacy of users online and can also contravene copyright. It is relatively simple to ensure that web scraping stays within the confines of the law.
Is Web Scraping Useful?
Yes. What do you do if you need to research something? Google it, probably! This is half of what web scraping is, combing the internet for useful information and using it elsewhere.
In fact, when you copy and paste from a website, you are manually carrying out the same job as a web scraper. Web scrapers allow you to scale this up dramatically; they locate relevant information for you and take care of transferring it.
What’s the Difference Between Web Scraping and Web Crawling?
Web crawlers and web scrapers generally work together. The crawler leads the scraper through webpages. It trawls through information relevant to your query, following links and interacting with site elements whilst holding the hand of the scraper, which follows. The scraper is the element that actually records the data – the crawler can’t write and the scraper can’t see.