Web scraping — get useful data out of web pages & collect it systematically
There are millions of web sites, and certainly many of them have granular data that is interesting to you — not just today, but on a regular basis. For example, you may want to see the information aggregated over time or geography, or combine it with your own data — think of applications such as product pricing, market research, competitor intelligence, product development, news & content monitoring, weather forecasts monitoring, lead generation, social media listening, satellite imaging analysis over time, and many more.
Of course Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs) can be used for this purpose. Many web sites offer APIs to allow users to download data on a regular basis. But what can one do when there’s no satisfactory API?
The answer is web scraping: extract information from a web page. Doing it programmatically is generally cheap, easy to implement, usually quick and accurate. But it also requires skills in data transformation and cleaning, as the scraping output cannot be easily used otherwise; the scraping code may need maintenance and tweaks if the web site source code changes — even if its appearance stays the same; web sites may try to block users from extracting information; and, importantly, there are legal implications in terms of data ownership.
Quantum has an extensive expertise in collecting information via web scraping, cleaning and processing it, linking it with other data and extracting insights from it. Interested to learn more about web scraping and how you can get useful data out of web pages? Contact us today at info@qbis.ch
