10 Myths about Web Scraping Services

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10 Myths about Web Scraping Services

  • 07/02/2020

10 Myths about Web Scraping Services

  • 07/02/2020

10 Myths about Web Scraping Services

  • 07/02/2020

10 Myths about Web Scraping Services

  • 07/02/2020

What Is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from a website or another source of information. Instead of waiting for long hours to copy-paste information, the 2020 edition of data extraction requires only a few minutes to scrape an entire piece of information.

Web scraping, illegal, misunderstanding, web crawling, data extraction, myths, Data Mining, Crawling, Crawler, Data

Web scraping
is great. It functions on the main criteria for every business which is data
retrieval. In 2020 data is everything and web scraping ensures that you are
getting a dose of all that in your business strategies.

Interesting Read: What is Web Scraping: Introduction, Applications, and Best Practices

1. Web Scraping is illegal

Many people
have false impressions about web scraping. It is because there are people don’t
respect the great work on the internet and use it by stealing the content. Web
scraping isn’t illegal by itself, yet the problem comes when people use it
without the site owner’s permission and disregard of the ToS (Terms of
Service). According to the report, 2% of online revenues can be lost due to the
misuse of content through web scraping. Even though web scraping doesn’t have a
clear law and terms to address its application, it’s encompassed with legal
regulations. For example:

2. Web scraping and web crawling are the same

Web scraping involves specific data extraction on a targeted webpage, for instance, extract data about sales leads, real estate listing, and product pricing. In contrast, web crawling is what search engines do. It scans and indexes the whole website along with its internal links. “Crawler” navigates through the web pages without a specific goal.

Interesting Read: https://hirinfotech.com/data-mining-vs-data-harvesting/

3. You can scrape any website

It is often the case that people ask for scraping things like email addresses, Facebook posts, or LinkedIn information. According to an article titled “Is web crawling legal?” it is important to note the rules before conduct web scraping:

  • Private
    data that requires username and passcodes cannot be scrapped.
  • Compliance
    with the ToS (Terms of Service) which explicitly prohibits the action of web
    scraping.
  • Don’t
    copy data that is copyrighted.

One person
can be prosecuted under several laws. For example, one scraped some
confidential information and sold it to a third party disregarding the desist
letter sent by the site owner. This person can be prosecuted under the law of
Trespass to Chattel, Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and Misappropriation.

It doesn’t
mean that you can’t scrape social media channels like Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram,
and YouTube.
They are friendly to scraping services that follow the provisions of the
robots.txt file. For Facebook, you need to get its written permission before
conducting the behavior of automated data collection.

4. You need to know how to code

A web
scraping tool (data extraction tool)
is very useful regarding
non-tech professionals like marketers, statisticians, financial consultant,
bitcoin investors, researchers, journalists, etc. Web scraping with Python is
time-consuming. On the other side, a web scraping template is efficient and
convenient to capture the data you need.

5. You can use scraped data for anything

It is
perfectly legal if you scrape data from websites for public consumption and use
it for analysis. However, it is not legal if you scrape confidential
information for profit. For example, scraping private contact information
without permission, and sell them to a 3rd party for profit is illegal.
Besides, repackaging scraped content as your own without citing the source is
not ethical as well. You should follow the idea of no spamming, no plagiarism,
or any fraudulent use of data is prohibited according to the law.

6. A web scraper is versatile

Maybe you’ve
experienced particular websites that change their layouts or structure once in
a while. Don’t get frustrated when you come across such websites that your
scraper fails to read for the second time. There are many reasons. It isn’t
necessarily triggered by identifying you as a suspicious bot. It also may be
caused by different geo-locations or machine access. In these cases, it is
normal for a web scraper to fail to parse the website before we set the
adjustment.

Interesting Read: https://hirinfotech.com/data-mining-vs-machine-learning-whats-the-difference/

7. You can scrape at a fast speed

You may have
seen scraper ads saying how speedy their crawlers are. It does sound good as
they tell you they can collect data in seconds. However, you are the lawbreaker
who will be prosecuted if damages are caused. It is because a scalable data
request at a fast speed will overload a web server which might lead to a server
crash. In this case, the person is responsible for the damage under the law of
“trespass to chattels” law (Dryer and Stockton 2013). If you are not sure
whether the website is scrapable or not, please ask the web scraping service
provider. Hir Infotech is a responsible web scraping service
provider
who places clients’ satisfaction in the first place. It is
crucial for Hir Infotech to help our clients get the problem solved and to be
successful.

8. API and Web Scraping are the same

API is like
a channel to send your data request to a web server and get desired data. API
will return the data in JSON format over the HTTP protocol. For example,
Facebook API, Twitter API, and Instagram API. However, it doesn’t mean you can
get any data you ask for. Web scraping can visualize the process as it allows
you to interact with the websites. Hir Infotech has web scraping templates. It
is even more convenient for non-tech professionals to extract data by filling
out the parameters with keywords/URLs.

9. The scraped data only works for our business after being cleaned and analyzed

Many data
integration platforms can help visualize and analyze the data. In comparison,
it looks like data scraping doesn’t have a direct impact on business decision
making. Web scraping indeed extracts raw data of the
webpage
that needs to be processed to gain insights like sentiment
analysis.  However, some raw data can be
extremely valuable in the hands of gold miners.

With Hir
Infotech Google Search web scraping template to search for an organic search
result, you can extract information including the titles and meta descriptions
about your competitors to determine your SEO strategies; For retail industries,
web scraping can be used to monitor product pricing and distributions. For
example, Amazon may crawl Flipkart and Walmart under the “Electronic”
catalog to assess the performance of electronic items.

10. Web scraping can only be used in business

Web scraping is widely used in various fields besides lead generation, price monitoring, price tracking, market analysis for business. Students can also leverage a Google scholar web scraping template to conduct paper research.  Realtors are able to conduct housing research and predict the housing market. You will be able to find Youtube influencers or Twitter evangelists to promote your brand or your own news aggregation that covers the only topics you want by scraping news media and RSS feeds.

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At Hir Infotech, we know that every dollar you spend on your business is an investment, and when you don’t get a return on that investment, it’s money down the drain. To ensure that we’re the right business with you before you spend a single dollar, and to make working with us as easy as possible, we offer free quotes for your project.

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Request a free quote

At Hir Infotech, we know that every dollar you spend on your business is an investment, and when you don’t get a return on that investment, it’s money down the drain. To ensure that we’re the right business with you before you spend a single dollar, and to make working with us as easy as possible, we offer free quotes for your project.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Request a free quote

At Hir Infotech, we know that every dollar you spend on your business is an investment, and when you don’t get a return on that investment, it’s money down the drain. To ensure that we’re the right business with you before you spend a single dollar, and to make working with us as easy as possible, we offer free quotes for your project.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Request a free quote

At Hir Infotech, we know that every dollar you spend on your business is an investment, and when you don’t get a return on that investment, it’s money down the drain. To ensure that we’re the right business with you before you spend a single dollar, and to make working with us as easy as possible, we offer free quotes for your project.

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