Data Scraping Difficulties and Solutions

Who uses information from the web?

• Online retailers may check how they stack up against the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Target, Flipkart, and AliExpress by using Web Scraper IDE to gather data from competing marketplaces.

• Entrepreneurs are mining social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn for data to improve their leads and identify key opinion leaders.

• It is common practice for real estate firms to maintain a database of available properties in their preferred markets.

Let’s discuss some of the difficulties that arise when scraping data

1st Challenge: Software

Should you outsource your software infrastructure or build it yourself?

Do-it-Yourself (DIY) 

You can employ software professionals to write proprietary code to create a data scraper. Many open-source Python packages are available, including:

• BeautifulSoup
• Scrapy
• Selenium

The software is customized to your specific needs, thanks to proprietary coding. The price is high, though:

• code for hundreds of hours
• purchases and licensing for software and hardware
• Even if the collection fails, you will still be required to pay for the proxy infrastructure and bandwidth.

The major challenge is software maintenance. The crawler breaks and requires code repair when the target website changes its page structure, which occurs regularly.

And the other three difficulties that are described below must still be addressed.

Data Scraping Tools

You might also employ a specialized third-party vendor like Hir infotech.

Other software that is accessible online can be out-of-date and outdated. Buy with caution or caveat emptor. It may be a sign of their software quality if their website appears to have been designed in the 20th century.

The entire data extraction is handled by a no-code platform from Hir Infotech called Web Scraper IDE, and you only pay for success. For more details, see below.

2nd Challenge: blocking

Isn’t it annoying when we attempt to enter a website and are met with a riddle to demonstrate that we are not robots? Ironically, a robot is a puzzling problem!

It’s a challenge to get past the bots in general, not simply while visiting websites. You’ll need to get past the robots manning the gates if you want to extract data from public websites. Site sentries and CAPTCHAs work to thwart the acquisition of large amounts of data. It’s a cat-and-mouse game where the level of technical complexity rises over time. Hir infotech’s superpower is to navigate the minefield with care and success.

3rd Challenge: Scale and Speed

The underlying proxy architecture has an impact on the linked difficulties of speed and scale of data scraping:

The number of pages in many data scraping initiatives grows from tens of thousands to millions very quickly.

The majority of data scraping technologies have low simultaneous request rates and sluggish data gathering rates. Check the vendor’s collection rate, account for the required amount of pages, and take the frequency of collection into consideration. This might not be a problem for you if you only need to scrape a few pages and can arrange for the collection to run at night.

4rth challenge: Data Accuracy

Our previous talk covered the reasons why some software solutions could only be able to partially or unsuccessfully retrieve data. The crawler/data collector may become damaged by changes to the site’s page structure, resulting in incomplete or erroneous data.

Check the delivery method and format of the data in addition to its accuracy and completeness. The data must be effortlessly incorporated into your current systems. Your database structure can be customized to speed up the ETL process.

Frequently asked question:

Can I scrape publicly available data?

It is perfectly legal to utilize web scraping to get freely available online information. Because some types of data are covered by international laws, you should exercise caution while scraping private information, intellectual property, or personal information.

How many different kinds of scraping are there?

The following are the three primary categories of data scraping: User-generated reports are mined by software to obtain data from websites. Similar to printing a page, but using the user’s report as the printer. Screen scraping: Using this method, data is transferred from more aged machines to more modern ones.

What is a different name for data scraping?

Web harvesting, screen scraping, and web scraping are other names for web scraping.