Tuesday 8 September 2015

Custom Data Scraping and Powerful Web Crawling

Crawling refers to handling of a huge data set, wherein one can develop their own crawlers, crawling to the web pages.Web crawling, also known as indexing, is usually used to index varied information derived from web by utilizing bots, referred to as spiders/crawlers. These web crawlers are used by some major search engines such as Bing, Google and Bing. On the other hand, data web scraping refers to gathering information from different sources. Irrespective of the different approaches, extracting data from web is often referred to as scraping, which is a misconception. Here are a few evident and subtle differences in opinion about it.



Scraping data not always involve web as data scraping can be done by extracting information from any database or local machine. Even if the data is derived from the internet, the "Save as" link appearing on the page can also be referred as the subset of the scraping. However, crawling not only differs in scale, but also in range. As you may know that crawling is equal to web crawling, meaning that the data can only be crawled. There are several dedicated programs that do such incredible job and they are known as crawl agents or spiders. Most of these bots are algorithmically designed in order to reach to the depth of a web page.

Web acts as a practicing platform; therefore innumerable content is developed and also get duplicated. To cite an example, a blog might be posted on different pages and the crawlers don't realize that. Thus, data de-duplication forms an important part of crawling. Well, this is performed to acquire two things; one, to keep the customers happy by not providing them with same data and the other is to save some space in the servers. However, dedupe isn't a part of web or data scraping.

Coordinating the successive crawlers is a challenging part in web crawling. The spiders should be polite with the servers. Also, the spiders need to get more intelligent in order to learn when and exactly how to hit a server to crawl data to web pages.

As mentioned earlier, there are many crawl agents that are used for crawling several websites and so, it is important to ensure that they do not conflict in the process. However, this situation is unlikely to arise while web scraping.

Besides, scraping is a representation of a node of crawling that is popularly known as extraction. Well, this too needs algorithms as well as automation in place.

However, both web crawling and web scraping services are intended to improve the online businesses. The data collected and stored, such as zip code, email id and much more, will help in gathering data about the customers, so that the business can realize their clients and work according to their needs to change the one-time customers into regular buyers.

We at Web-Parsing has expertise in providing Quality Web Scraping and Data Extraction services specifically engineered for your data need.

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