A Simple Guide To Web Scraping Software

When you think about secret agents, how can you forget Johnny English? The quirky MI7 agent has a unique style of solving any case. You will agree with us that Johnny English can extract minute details about the case from a whole lot of possibilities – often unintentionally. However, you may remember when he collected information about the four Vortex members, revealed their secret weapon and managed to stop the gang’s evil plans. Well, this is why we love him!

Did you know that Johnny English has a striking similarity to Web Scraping Software? Confused? Allow us to elaborate! Just like Johnny English, who extracts minute clues from a crime scene, collects and organizes all data and uses it to form meaningful information, Web Scraping Software extracts data from many websites and converts this unstructured data into structured information and insights so it can be used in business decision-making.

Want to know more about this awesome agent called Web Scraping Software? Get in our Rolls-Royce Phantom to raise the curtain on what Web Scraping Software is, its evolution, working, applications, benefits and future!
 

Let’s Begin With What Is Web Scraping Software?

Johnny English pays attention to details while solving any case. He dissects every clue to get the real hidden information that everyone else dismisses. Taking his path, before hopping directly to Web Scraping Software, let’s first understand web scraping.

Web scraping is a method that can automatically obtain large amounts of structured data from websites. This method requires a crawler and a scraper. Wondering what they are? We’ve got you covered; a crawler is a tool that runs on an Artificial Intelligence algorithm to browse the internet and search for data on hyperlinks across the internet. On the other hand, a scraper is a tool used to extract data from websites. It is difficult to build a web scraper without a good knowledge of coding. This is where Web Scraping Software comes into the picture!

Web Scraping Software for example, Octoparse is a tool designed to extract data from a website through crawlers and scrapers. You can certainly rely on it to collect information from a website via automated means. This software is designed for all kinds of enterprises to use web scraping to collect structured data for various tasks. The concept of Web Scraping Software is not new; it is as old as the web. Want to know when it started? Read on!
 

Timeline Of Web Scraping Software

The concept of web scraping has a long history (just like Johnny English), dating back to 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Two years later, Tim Berners-Lee created the very first web browser running on a NeXT computer server, giving people access to interact with the World Wide Web easily.

A few years later, in 1993, Matthew Gray came up with the concept of web crawling called The Wanderer. However, it didn’t rise to fame because, in the same year, JumpStation, a crawler-based web search engine and the basis for today’s big names such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others was born. With this, the internet became a free-source platform for data of all kinds.

The BeautifulSoup library, an HTML parser written in Python was created almost a decade later. It helped programmers grasp the website’s structure and parse its content to extract information in HTML containers. Since the internet had grown huge by then, anyone with a computer and an internet connection could access and extract information from websites. Although websites did not restrict people from downloading content for several years, the amount of branded data being created prompted the development of new methods of scraping information.

Soon after that, web scraping was born. Stephan Andersen created Web Integration Platform 6.0, which allowed users to extract data from a web page and structure it into a usable database, allowing non-programmers to easily pull data from the web.

You must know certain details before investing in Web Scraping Software for your business. One of the most important ones is its working.
 

Working Of Web Scraping Software

You can’t always rely on Johnny English to help you extract evidence (read data); thus, you need Web Scraping Software to handle the job. So, without further ado, let’s learn how this software works.

Prior to scraping, the software is given one or more URLs to load. The software then loads the entire HTML code for the page in question. Did you know advanced software will parse the entire website, including CSS and Javascript elements too? Well, now you do! The software will either extract all the data on the webpage or extract data selected by the user before the project is run.

Finally, the Web Scraping Software shows all the data that has been collected in a format that is more useful to the user. A CSV (Comma-Separated Values) or Excel spreadsheet is the most common destination for web-scraped data. However, the best part is that advanced scraping software can produce JSON files that can be used for an API (Application Programming Interface) to use in advanced operations.

If you are mesmerized by the software, then you will be even more delighted to know its benefits. #ItsShowTime
 

Benefits Of Web Scraping Software

Here are some of the benefits of using Web Scraping Software:
 

• Helps In Achieving Automation:

  Automatic data extraction from websites using Web Scraping Software saves time and effort, allowing your workforce to redirect your energy on some other important tasks.

• Enables Better Business Decisions Through Market Insights:

  Collecting and analyzing a large volume of web data extracted by Web Scraping Software allows you to monitor competitors’ marketing activity and quickly make decisions. By scraping data from the internet, cleaning and analyzing it, you can get a better picture of the market, which will lead to better business decision-making.

• Provides Unique And Rich Datasets:

  Did you know there are at least 6.05 billion pages on the internet consisting of a great deal of text, photos, videos and numerical data? Well, searching for relevant data from this volume is not a cakewalk. However, thanks to Web Scraping Software, you can find the relevant websites, set up website crawlers to gather custom datasets and then analyze them.

• Effectively Manage Data:

  Instead of copying and pasting information from the internet, you can collect the data you need in useable formats from various websites by using Web Scraping Software. For more sophisticated crawling, your data can be stored in the cloud database and updated daily.

Well, moving forward, the next section enlightens the future of this software, which we know is bright.
 

Future Of Web Scraping Software

There is no reason not to use Web Scraping Software. Extracting essential data for your organization from a large volume of online web pages is one heck of a job and with the growing volume of data on the internet, Web Scraping Software has gained popularity. It will continue to do so in the future.

Web Scraping Software, combined with recent advances in machine language and Natural Language Processing (NLP), will increase the power of this software. With this combination, the software would be able to not just scrape data but classify, organize and label it as well, giving businesses insights they would never have imagined were possible.

Another growth will be seen in its legality. There is much dispute about the legality of Web Scraping Software as many websites assert that web crawling can negatively impact consumer privacy and gather private information. One of the most anticipated developments in Web Scraping Software would be legal compliance to test and develop Web Scraping Software effectively.
 

It’s A Wrap

 
You are probably aware that the internet is a goldmine of information. However, finding and extracting the data from this volume in a usable format is another story; even Johnny English can’t help you with this. Users need to be able to find specific information and filter out all the irrelevant data as quickly as possible. This is where Web Scraping Software comes in handy. You can use this type of software to extract structured data from websites to extract the information you need faster, more efficiently and reliably than before. We hope our introductory guide has helped you understand this software better!