Embracing Big Data may sound complicated but it need not be. Web scraping (aka. web crawling, web data extraction, web harvesting, screen scraping, etc) is a technique used for acquiring large amounts of data from the web, such as social media, news portals, government reports or forums and turn it into structural datasets such as Excel, CSV, or database. This data can then be analyzed or processed for various purposes. Despite that web scraping is really nothing new, not many of us are aware of the web scraping activities happening around us every day. So in this article, I want to share the ways real businesses are using web scraping to achieve their strategic goals. If you are lucky, you may be enlightened by some of these ideas.

1. Content Aggregation

Collect
articles of any topics from UGC platforms such as Quora or Medium conveniently.
Broaden the scope of your original content by including other’s people’s
perspectives.

2. Competitive Monitoring

Stay tuned of what your competitors are doing, their events, product developments, pricing strategies, and marketing campaigns.  Knowing what those competitors are up to can help you stay ahead of the game and always be ready to fight back.

Also Read – What is Web Scraping?

3. Sentiment Analysis

Understand
customer sentiment and feedback by extracting reviews from E-commerce portals
and other public sites.

Know your customers better and how they are perceiving the products and services offered by your business. Depending on the specific industry, Yelp, Amazon, Trip Advisors, and the other dozens of rating and review sites are great places to explore.

4. Lead Generation

Simply find a website where your prospective buyers can be found, fetch the information you need such as phone numbers, emails, addresses. Web scraping can help you collect thousands of leads within minutes.

Read More:

• https://hirinfotech.com/lead-generation/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_generation

5. Gather real estate listings

Scrape
property details and agent contact details from real estate websites (eg.
Zillow, Realtor, etc)

Read More:

• https://hirinfotech.com/business-directory-scraping/

6. Market Research

Turn
any data you find online into structured data and analyze them using any BI
tools. Custom analysis can effectively reflect public demand and behaviors that
are important for any business.

Read More:

• https://hirinfotech.com/web-research/

7. Create product catalogs

By scraping product information (price, images, rating, reviews, etc) from retailer/manufacturer/E-commerce websites (eg. Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, etc.)

8. Know Market Trends

Find out what’s trending in the market by collecting data from different social media websites (eg. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc)

9. Video Collection

Fetch video, including titles and subtitles from YouTube and other similar video hosting sites.

10. Machine Learning

Crawl all the data you need, let it be data points, images, or files for training your bots from the largest repository of data, the web!

Also Read – Why business require data scraping services?

11. Search Engine Optimization

Scrape
metadata (eg. title/description/etc) from any websites or crawl internet search
engine results for Search Engine Optimization monitoring.

Read More:

• https://hirinfotech.com/search-engine-scraping/

12. Price Intelligence (Competitive Price Monitoring)

Use web scraping to monitor what your competitors are offering in real-time. Learn about your competitors’ pricing strategies and increase your profits.

Read More:

• https://hirinfotech.com/product-scraping-uploading/

13. Job Board Create

Build a job board by scraping job pages on company websites or job sites (eg. Indeed, Glassdoor, etc).

14. Content curation

Crawl
forums and communities to extract data including posts and authors.

15. Daily update from Regulatory

Scrape regulatory or statistical information from Government websites.

16. Hotel, Tourism Data & Review

Extract hotel data, compare data such as pricing or review rating to stay competitive or aggregate this data to build your own platform.

17. News Aggregation Website

Build News aggregation sites by crawling news data from different news portals.

18. Amazon Product Scraping

Identify best-selling products on Amazon buy customer buying patterns.

19. Own price comparison site

Build your own price comparison site for all kinds of products and services.

20. Get Insurance Coverage Data

Scrape insurance coverage from providers’ websites. 

21. Brand Monitoring/Online Reputation

If you have a brand that people talk about via different channels, such as social media, forums, or others, you might want to set up an automatic mechanism to fetch those data relevant to your interest and implement sentiment analysis for better decision marking.

22. Detect fake reviews

Use
web crawling to filter out fake reviews (shillings) for more accurate analysis.

23. The target audience in advertising

Scrape
customer profiles for accurate ad targeting. Understand your customers better
by analyzing their comments or reviews, such as their genders, age groups,
spending habits even hobbies to make better-targeted ads based on the observed
patterns. If available, use profiles information for accurate ad
targeting. 

24. Hospital & Health Care Information

Scrape health physicians or doctors including their contact information from the various directory or hospital/clinic websites

25. Historical Judgment for Legal

Scrape historical judgments report as case reference for legal purposes

26. Scrape restaurant menu

Get restaurant menu, review, rating, and price from famous websites like Zomato, Swiggy, Uber eats. 

27. Financial Statistics

Extract financial data in real-time, such as stock and fund prices.

28. Medical & Pharmaceutical

Extract medical information, such as medicine details from Pharmaceutical Websites

29. Sports Data

Fetch sports data from different sports portals of Cricket, Football, Volleyball, Badminton, Tenis.

30. Car Parts Information

Scrape car data or vehicle parts information from the web

As Carly Fiorina, former executive, president, and chair of Hewlett-Packard Co. had said, “the goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight”. Having the World Wide Web around means having the world’s largest and unbiased database, creating unprecedented business opportunities. Act now and stay ahead of the game.