Semalt Review: What Is Web Scraping?

23.05.2018

Semalt Review: What Is Web
Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of gathering information from the web. However, data is gathered for different
purposes. Extraction robots help to automate the process of gathering information from the web faster and more
accurately. So, web scrapers save you a lot of time that can be spent into other activities.

Examples of web scraping

As an illustration of how useful web scraping robots are, take a sales team for instance. To get good leads, they may
need to do some cold calling. But how do they get the numbers of whom to call? It is a good idea to search a
directory to pull out numbers. Do you know how many hours will be spent just to get the phone numbers of a
tangible number of prospective customers? It can be time-consuming and frustrating.

This is where a web scraper comes in handy. You can program it to extract certain information from a particular list
on the web. You can build a dexi.io robot to search a directory of public listed companies and extract contacts like

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23.05.2018

phone numbers and email addresses. This is just a simple illustration. Web scrapers can be applied to different data
gathering tasks.

Price comparison sites also make use of web scraping robots to extract
prices of different products like smartphones, hotels, credit cards, and
insurance just to mention a few. In fact, some comparison sites also
scrape data from another comparison sites. In other words, price
comparison is another reason for web scraping.

To be ahead of your competitors, you need to have access to the data that
only very few people have access to. This is why some companies have
built thousands of robots looking for rare but bene cial information. In
sport betting, the more data you have than other bettors, the better your
odds.

In fact, having more information than your bookmakers gives you a competitive edge over them. For instance, if
countries A and B are about to have a football match, and country A has beaten B in 80 percent of their total
encounters, most bettors will put their stake on country A. But if the venue for the match is in Country B, and you
and only a few other bettors found out that A has never beaten B in the latter's home before, you will wager on B,
and the fact that most bettors went in favor of country A will even give you more money if you win. That is the
simple advantage of having access to more data than others. It makes you limit your risk and also maximize your
pro t.

Web scraping is also a useful research tool

Researchers also make use of web scrapers for their activities. Universities, NGOs, and Governments also make use
of web scraping. Some extracted data is essential for some purposes like monitoring the state of the Earth, building
robotic cars, and even for AI-driven inventions.

How to begin with web scraping

Since dexi.io has built a great easy-to-use data extraction tool, you can begin by learning how to use the tool. It is
very effective for data re ning, web crawling, and web scraping. While machines need data to exist, dexi.io helps to
process the data to machines.

Getting started now

In the course of embarking on your rst web scraping, you should use the
terms external data processing or data research to avoid ambiguity. You
also need to break down the intelligence behind your algorithm and data
on paper. Most importantly, since this is your rst time, you should be
prepared to fail, learn from your mistakes and improve. The earlier you
start, the better.

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Try it for free

You can sign up and try the tool for free. To put it in the simplest form, a data scraping robot does a task that will
take a thousand people several years to complete.

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