How Web Crawling Can Help Venture Capital Firms

How Web Crawling Can Help Venture Capital Firms

Venture capital firms are constantly on the lookout of innovative start-ups for investment. Whether you provide financial capital to early-stage start-ups in IT, software products, biotechnology or other booming industries, you will need the right information as soon as possible. In general, analysing media data to discover and validate insights is one of key areas in which analysts work. Hence, constantly monitoring popular media outlets is one of the ways VCs can deploy to spot trends. Read on to understand how web crawling can not only speed up this whole process but also improve the workflow and accuracy of insights.

What is web crawling

Web crawling simply refers to the use of automated computer programs to visit websites and extract specific bits of information. This is the same technology used by search engines to find, index and serve search results for user queries. Web crawling, as you’d have guessed is a technical and niche process. It takes skilled programmers to write programs that can navigate through the web to find and extract the needed data.

There are DIY tools, vertical specific data providers and DaaS (Data as a service) solutions that VC firms can deploy for crawling.  Although there is the option of setting up an in-house crawling setup, this isn’t recommended for Venture Capital firms. The high tech-barrier and complexity of web crawling process can lead to loss of focus for the VC firms. DaaS can be the ideal option as it’s suitable for recurring and large-scale requirements which only a hosted solution can offer.

How web crawling can help Venture Capital firms

Crawling start-up and entrepreneurship blogs using a web crawling service can help VC firms avail the much-needed data that they can use to discover new trends and validate their research. This can complement the existing research process and make it much more efficient.

1. Spot trends

Spotting new trends in the market is extremely important for venture capital firms. This helps identify the niches that have high probability of bringing in profit. Since investing in companies that have higher chances of succeeding is what Venture capital firms do, the ability to spot trends becomes an invaluable tool.

Web crawling can harvest enough data to identify trends in the market. Websites like Techcrunch and Venturebeat are great sources of start-up related news and information. Media sites like these talk about trending topics constantly. To spot trends in the market, you could use a web crawling solution to extract the article title, date and URL for the current time period and run this data through an analytics solution to identify the most used words in the article titles and URLs. Venture capital firms can then use these insights to target newer companies in the trending niches. Technology blogs, forums and communities can be great places to find relevant start-ups.

2. Validate findings

The manual research by the analysts needs to be validated before the firm can go ahead with further proceedings. Validation can be done by comparing the results of the manual work with the relevant data extracted using web crawling. This not only makes validation much easier but also helps in the weeding out process, thus reducing the possibilities of making mistakes. This can be partially automated by using intelligent data processing/visualisation tools on top the data.

3. Save time

Machines are much faster than humans. Employing web crawling to assist in the research processes in a venture capital firm can save the analysts a lot of time and effort. This time can be further invested in more productive activities like analytics, deep research and evaluation.

Source:-https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/web-crawling-for-venture-capital-firms

Data Scraping Doesn’t Have to Be Hard

All You Need Is the Right Data Scraping Partner

Odds are your business needs web data scraping. Data scraping is the act of using software to harvest desired data from target websites. So, instead of you spending every second scouring the internet and copying and pasting from the screen, the software (called “spiders”) does it for you, saving you precious time and resources.

Departments across an organization will profit from data scraping practices.

Data scraping will save countless hours and headaches by doing the following:

- Monitoring competitors’ prices, locations and service offerings
- Harvesting directory and list data from the web, significantly improving your lead generation
- Acquiring customer and product marketing insight from forums, blogs and review sites
- Extracting website data for research and competitive analysis
- Social media scraping for trend and customer analysis
- Collecting regular or even real time updates of exchange rates, insurance rates, interest rates, -mortgage rates, real estate, stock prices and travel prices

It is a no-brainer, really. Businesses of all sizes are integrating data scraping into their business initiatives. Make sure you stay ahead of the competition by effectively data scraping.

Now for the hard part

The “why should you data scrape?” is the easy part. The “how” gets a bit more difficult. Are you savvy in Python and HTML? What about JavaScript and AJAX? Do you know how to utilize a proxy server? As your data collection grows, do you have the cloud-based infrastructure in place to handle the load? If you or someone at your organization can answer yes to these questions, do they have the time to take on all the web data scraping tasks? More importantly, is it a cost-effective use of your valuable staffing resources for them to do this? With constantly changing websites, resulting in broken code and websites automatically blacklisting your attempts, it could be more of a resource drain than anticipated.

Instead of focusing on all the issues above, business users should be concerned with essential questions such as:

- What data do I need to grow my business?
- Can I get the data I need, when I want it and in a format I can use?
- Can the data be easily stored for future analysis?
- Can I maximize my staffing resources and get this data without any programming knowledge or IT assistance?
- Can I start now?
- Can I cost-effectively collect the data needed to grow my business?

A web data scraping partner is standing by to help you!

This is where purchasing innovative web scraping services can be a game changer. The right partner can harness the value of the web for you. They will go into the weeds so you can spend your precious time growing your business.

Hold on a second! Before you run off to purchase data scraping services, you need to make sure you are looking for the solution that best fits your organisational needs. Don’t get overwhelmed. We know that relinquishing control of a critical business asset can be a little nerve-wracking. To help, we have come up with our steps and best practices for choosing the right data scraping company for your organisation.

1) Know Your Priorities

We have brought this up before, but when going through a purchasing decision process we like to turn to Project Management 101: The Project Management Triangle. For this example, we think a Euler diagram version of the triangle fits best.
Data Scraping and the Project Management Triangle

In this example, the constraints show up as Fast (time), Good (quality) and Cheap (cost). This diagram displays the interconnection of all three elements of the project. When using this diagram, you are only able to pick two priorities. Only two elements may change at the expense of the third:

- We can do the project quickly with high quality, but it will be costly
- We can do the project quickly at a reduced cost, but quality will suffer
- We can do a high-quality project at a reduced cost, but it will take much longer
Using this framework can help you shape your priorities and budget. This really, in turn, helps you search for and negotiate with a data scraping company.

2) Know your budget/resources.

This one is so important it is on here twice. Knowing your budget and staffing resources before reaching out to data scraping companies is key. This will make your search much more efficient and help you manage the entire process.

3) Have a plan going in.

Once again, you should know your priorities, budget, business objectives and have a high-level data scraping plan before choosing a data scraping company. Here are a few plan guidelines to get you started:

- Know what data points to collect: contact information, demographics, prices, dates, etc.
- Determine where the data points can most likely be found on the internet: your social media and review sites, your competitors’ sites, chambers of commerce and government sites, e-commerce sites your products/competitors’ products are sold, etc.
- What frequency do you need this data and what is the best way to receive it? Make sure you can get the data you need and in the correct format. Determine whether you can perform a full upload each time or just the changes from the previous dataset. Think about whether you want the data delivered via email, direct download or automatically to your Amazon S3 account.
- Who should have access to the data and how will it be stored once it is harvested?
- Finally, the plan should include what you are going to do with all this newly acquired data and who is receiving the final analysis.

4) Be willing to change your plan.

This one may seem counterintuitive after so much focus on having a game plan. However, remember to be flexible. The whole point of hiring experts is that they are the experts. A plan will make discussions much more productive, but the experts will probably offer insight you hadn’t thought of. Be willing to integrate their advice into your plan.

5) Have a list of questions ready for the company.

Having a list of questions ready for the data scraping company will help keep you in charge of the discussions and negotiations. Here are some points that you should know before choosing a data scraping partner:
- Can they start helping you immediately? Make sure they have the infrastructure and staff to get - you off the ground in a matter of weeks, not months.
- Make sure you can access them via email and phone. Also make sure you have access to those -actually performing the data scraping, not just a call center.
- Can they tailor their processes to fit with your requirements and organisational systems?
- Can they scrape more than plain text? Make sure they can harvest complex and dynamic sites -with JavaScript and AJAX. If a website’s content can be viewed on a browser, they should be-- able to get it for you.
- Make sure they have monitoring systems in place that can detect changes, breakdowns, and -quality issues. This will ensure you have access to a persistent and reliable flow of data, even - when the targeted websites change formats.
- As your data grows, can they easily keep up? Make sure they have scalable solutions that could - handle all that unstructured web data.
- Will they protect your company? Make sure they know discretion is important and that they will not advertise you as a client unless you give permission. Also, check to see how they disguise their scrapers so that the data harvesting cannot be traced back to your business.

6) Check their reviews.

Do a bit of your own manual data scraping to see what others business are saying about the companies you are researching.

7) Make sure the plan the company offers is cost-effective.

Here are a few questions to ask to make sure you get a full view of the costs and fees in the estimate:
- Is there a setup fee?
- What are the fixed costs associated with this project?
- What are the variable costs and how are they calculated?
- Are there any other taxes, fees or things that I could be charged for that are not listed on this -quote?
- What are the payment terms?

Source Url :-http://www.data-scraping.com.au/data-scraping-doesnt-have-to-be-hard/

Why Customization is the Key Aspect of a Web Scraping Solution

Why Customization is the Key Aspect of a Web Scraping Solution

Every web data extraction requirement is unique when it comes to the technical complexity and setup process. This is one of the reasons why tools aren’t a viable solution for enterprise-grade data extraction from the web. When it comes to web scraping, there simply isn’t a solution that works perfectly out of the box. A lot of customization and tweaking goes into achieving a stable setup that can extract data from a target site on a continuous basis.

Customization web scraping service

This is why freedom of customization is one of the primary USPs of our web crawling solution. At PromptCloud, we go the extra mile to make data acquisition from the web a smooth and seamless experience for our client base that spans across industries and geographies. Customization options are important for any web data extraction project; Find out how we handle it.

The QA process

The QA process consists of multiple manual and automated layers to ensure only high-quality data is passed on to our clients. Once the crawlers are programmed by the technical team, the crawler code is peer reviewed to make sure that the optimal approach is used for extraction and to ensure there are no inherent issues with the code. If the crawler setup is deemed to be stable, it’s deployed on our dedicated servers.

The next part of manual QA is done once the data starts flowing in. The extracted data is inspected by our quality inspection team to make sure that it’s as expected. If issues are found, the crawler setup is tweaked to weed out the detected issues. Once the issues are fixed, the crawler setup is finalized. This manual layer of QA is followed by automated mechanisms that will monitor the crawls throughout the recurring extraction, hereafter.

Customization of the crawler

As we previously mentioned, customization options are extremely important for building high quality data feeds via web scraping. This is also one of the key differences between a dedicated web scraping service and a DIY tool. While DIY tools generally don’t have the mechanism to accurately handle dynamic and complex websites, a dedicated data extraction service can provide high level customization options. Here are some example scenarios where only a customizable solution can help you.

File download

Sometimes, the web scraping requirement would demand downloading of PDF files or images from the target sites. Downloading files would require a bit more than a regular web scraping setup. To handle this, we add an extra layer of setup along with the crawler which will download the required files to a local or cloud storage by fetching the file URLs from the target webpage. The speed and efficiency of the whole setup should be top notch for file downloads to work smoothly.

Resize images

If you want to extract product images from an Ecommerce portal, the file download customization on top of a regular web scraping setup should work. However, high resolution images can easily hog your storage space. In such cases, we can resize all the images being extracted programmatically in order to save you the cost of data storage. This scenario requires a very flexible crawling setup, which is something that can only be provided by a dedicated service provider.

Extracting key information from text

Sometimes, the data you need from a website might be mixed with other text. For example, let’s say you need only the ZIP codes extracted from a website where the ZIP code itself doesn’t have a dedicated field but is a part of the address text. This wouldn’t be normally possible unless you write a program to be introduced into the web scraping pipeline that can intelligently identify and separate the required data from the rest.
Extracting data points from site flow even if it’s missing in the final page

Sometimes, not all the data points that you need might be available on the same page. This is handled by extracting the data from multiple pages and merging the records together. This again requires a customizable framework to deliver data accurately.

Automating the QA process for frequently updated websites

Some websites get updated more of than others. This is nothing new; however, if the sites in your target list get updated at a very high frequency, the QA process could get time-consuming at your end. To cater to such a requirement, the scraping setup should run crawls at a very high frequency. Apart from this, once new records are added, the data should be run through a deduplication system to weed out the possibility of duplicate entries in the data. We can completely automate this process of quality inspection for frequently updated websites.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/customization-is-the-key-aspect-of-web-scraping-solution

Data Extraction/ Web Scraping Services

Making an informed business decision requires extracting, harvesting and exploiting information from diverse sources. Data extraction or web scraping (also known as web harvesting) is the process of mining information from websites using software, substantiated with human intelligence. The content 'scraped' from web sources using algorithms is stored in a structured format, so that it can be manually analyzed later.

Case in Point: How do price comparison websites acquire their pricing data? It is mostly by 'scraping' the information from online retailer websites.

We offers data extraction / web scraping services for retrieving data for advanced data processing or archiving from a variety of online sources and medium. Nonetheless, data extraction is a time consuming process, and if not conducted meticulously, it can result in loads of errors. A leading web scraping company, we can deliver required information within a short turnaround time, employing an extensive array of online sources.

Our Process Of Data Extraction/ Web Scraping, Involves:

- Capturing relevant data from the web, which is raw and unstructured
- Reviewing and refining the obtained data sets
- Formatting the data, consistent with the requirements of the client
- Organizing website and email lists, and contact details in an excel sheet
- Collating and summarizing the information, if required

Our professionals are adept at extracting data pertaining to your competition, their pricing strategy, gathering information about various product launches, their new and innovative features, etc., for enterprises, market research companies or price comparison websites through professional market research and subject matter blogs.

Our key Services in Web Scraping/ Database Extraction include:

We offer a comprehensive range of data extraction and scraping services right from Screen Scraping, Webpage / HTML Page Scraping, Semantic / Syntactic Scraping, Email Scraping to Database Extraction, PDF Data Extraction Services, etc.

- Extracting meta data from websites, blogs, and forums, etc.
- Data scraping from social media sites
- Data quarrying for online news and media sites from different online news and PR sources
- Data scraping from business directories and portals
- Data scraping pertaining to legal / medical / academic research
- Data scraping from real estate, hotels & restaurant, financial websites, etc.

Contact us to outsource your Data Scraping / Web Extraction Services or to-  learn more about our other data related services.

Source Url :-http://www.data-entry-india.com/data-extraction-web-scraping-services.html

Website Data Scraping Services

To help you in creating information databases, business portals and mailing lists, we provide efficient and accurate website data scraping services. We have been serving many worldwide clients for their specific requirements and delivering them structured data after collecting from World Wide Web. Our capabilities allow us to scrape data from an assortment of sources including websites, blogs, podcasts, and online directories etc.

 We have a team of skilled and experienced web scraping professionals who can deliver you results in the file format you needed such as Excel, CSV, Access, TXT and My SQL. We have expertise in automated as well as manual data scraping that ensure one hundred percent accuracy in the outcome. Our web data scraping professionals not only help you in gathering high-value data from the internet but also enable you to improve strategic insights and create new business opportunities.

What our website data scraping services include?

We provide a wide range of website data scraping services including data collection, data extraction, screen scraping and web data scraping. With its web scraping services, Data Outsourcing India helps you to crawl thousands of websites and gather useful information or data flawlessly. Using our web data scraping service, we can extract phone numbers, email addresses, reviews, ratings, business addresses, product details, contact information (name, title, department, company, country, city, state, etc.) and other business related data from following sources:

- Market place portals
- Auction portals
- Business directories
- Government online databases
- Statistics data from websites
- Social networking sites
- Online shopping portals
- Job portals
- Classifieds websites
- Hotels and restaurant portals
- News portals

Why outsource website data scraping services to us?

Our web data extraction experts have in-depth knowledge for screen scraping processes and it enables us to extract essential information from any online portal or database. If you outsource website data scraping to us, we assure you about accurate collection of information in easy to retrieval format. Here are some key benefits you gain with us:

- Tailor made processes to suit any kind of need
- Strict security and confidentiality policies
- A rigorous Quality Control (QC) process
- Leverage an optimum mix of techniques and technology
- Almost 60-65% savings on operational cost
- You get you project completed in industry’s best TAT
- Round-the-clock customer support
- Access to a dedicated team of website data scraping professionals

 With our quick, accurate and affordable web scraping services, we are helping worldwide large as well as medium size companies. Our clients are from different industries- including real estate, healthcare, banking, finance, insurance, automobiles, marketing, academics, human resources, ecommerce, manufacturing, travel, hotels and more. The-  multifaceted experience facilitates us in delivering every online data scraping project with ZERO error rates.

Source Url:-http://www.dataoutsourcingindia.com/website-data-scraping-services.html

How Artificial Intelligence Can be Applied to Web Data Extraction

How Artificial Intelligence Can be Applied to Web Data Extraction

Artificial intelligence is not a new topic at all. A lot has been written about it and it has been a popular theme of sci-fi movies from a decade ago. However, it was only recently that we started seeing AI in action. Thanks to the ever-increasing computing power, our machines are much faster and powerful now which also gives a huge boost to AI. It goes without saying that artificial intelligence requires more computing power to be truly intelligent and mimic the human brain.

artificial intelligence web data extraction

AI is finding its way into many everyday objects that we use. The voice assistant apps on your smartphone are a great example for this. Facebook’s face recognition algorithm is another example for intelligent pattern recognition technology in action. We believe that the extraction of data from web is something that humans shouldn’t be burdened with. Artificial intelligence could be the right solution to aggregating huge data sets from the web with minimal manual interference.

Artificial Intelligence VS Machine Learning

There is a stark difference between machine learning and artificial intelligence. In machine learning, you teach the machine to do something within narrowly defined rules along with some training examples. This training and rules are necessary for the machine learning system to achieve some level of success in the process it’s being taught. Whereas, in artificial intelligence, it does the teaching itself with minimal number of rules and loose training.  It can then go on to make rules for itself from the exposure that it gets, which contributes to the continued learning process. This is made possible by using artificial neural networks. Artificial neural networks and deep learning are used in artificial intelligence for speech and object recognition, image segmentation, modeling language and human motion.

Artificial intelligence in web data extraction

The web is a giant repository where data is vast and abundant. The possibilities that come with this amount of data can be ground breaking. The challenge is to navigate through this unstructured pile of information out there on the web and extract it. It takes a lot of time and effort to scrape data from the web, even with the advanced web scraping technologies. But things are about to change. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently released a paper on an artificial intelligence system that can extract information from sources on the web and learn how to do it on its own.

The research paper introduces an information extraction system that can extract structured data from unstructured documents automatically. To put it simply, the system can think like humans while looking at a document. When humans cannot find a particular piece of information in a document, we find alternative sources to fill the gap. This adds to our knowledge on the topic in question. The AI system works just like this.
The AI system works on rewards and penalties

The working of this AI based data extraction system involves classifying the data with a ‘Confidence score’. This confidence score determines the probability of the classification being statistically correct and is derived from the patterns in the training data. If the confidence score doesn’t meet the set threshold, the system will automatically search the web for more relevant data. Once the adequate confidence score is achieved by extracting new data from the web and integrating it with the current document, it will deem the task successful. If the confidence score is not met, the process continues until the most relevant data has been pulled out.

This type of learning mechanism is called ‘Reinforcement learning’ and works by the notion of learning by reward. It’s very similar to how humans learn. Since there can be a lot of uncertainty associated with the data being merged together, especially where contrasting information is involved, the rewards are given based on the accuracy of the information. With the training provided, the AI learns how to optimally merge different pieces of data together so that the answers we get from the system is as accurate as possible.
AI in action

To test how well the artificial intelligence system can extract data from the web, researchers gave it a test task. The system was to analyse various data sources on mass shootings in the USA and extract the name of the shooter, number of injured, fatalities and the location. The performance was in fact mind blowing as it could pull up the accurate data the way it was needed while beating conventionally taught data extraction mechanisms by more than 10 percent.

The future of data extraction

With ever increasing need for data and the challenges associated with acquiring it, AI could be what’s missing in the equation. The research is promising and hints at a future where intelligent bots with human sight can read and crawl web documents to tell us the bits we need to know.

The AI system could be a game changer in research tasks that require a lot of manual work from humans now. A system like this will not only save time but also enables us to make use of the abundance of information out there on the web. Looking at the bigger picture, this new research is only a step towards creating the truly intelligent web spider that can master a variety of tasks just like humans rather than being focused at just one process.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-web-data-extraction

The Ultimate Guide to Web Data Extraction

The Ultimate Guide to Web Data Extraction

Web data extraction (also known as web scraping, web harvesting, screen scraping, etc.) is a technique for extracting huge amounts of data from websites on the internet. The data available on websites is generally not available to download easily and can only be accessed by using a web browser. However, web is the largest repository of open data and this data has been growing at exponential rates since the inception of internet.

The Ultimate Guide to web data extraction

Web data is of great use to Ecommerce portals, media companies, research firms, data scientists, government and can even help the healthcare industry with ongoing research and making predictions on the spread of diseases.

Consider the data available on classifieds sites, real estate portals, social networks, retail sites, and online shopping websites etc. being easily available in a structured format, ready to be analyzed. Most of these sites don’t provide the functionality to save their data to a local or cloud storage. Some sites provide APIs, but they typically come with restrictions and aren’t reliable enough. Although it’s technically possible to copy and paste data from a website to your local storage, this is inconvenient and out of question when it comes to practical use cases for businesses.

Web scraping helps you do this in an automated fashion and does it far more efficiently and accurately. A web scraping setup interacts with websites in a way similar to a web browser, but instead of displaying it on a screen, it saves the data to a storage system.
Applications of web data extraction

1. Pricing intelligence

Pricing intelligence is an application that’s gaining popularity by each passing day given the tightening of competition in the online space. E-commerce portals are always watching out for their competitors using web crawling to have real time pricing data from them and to fine tune their own catalogs with competitive pricing. This is done by deploying web crawlers that are programmed to pull product details like product name, price, variant and so on. This data is plugged into an automated system that assigns ideal prices for every product after analyzing the competitors’ prices.

Pricing intelligence is also used in cases where there is a need for consistency in pricing across different versions of the same portal. The capability of web crawling techniques to extract prices in real time makes such applications a reality.

2. Cataloging

Ecommerce portals typically have a huge number of product listings. It’s not easy to update and maintain such a big catalog. This is why many companies depend on web date extractions services for gathering data required to update their catalogs. This helps them discover new categories they haven’t been aware of or update existing catalogs with new product descriptions, images or videos.

3. Market research

Market research is incomplete unless the amount of data at your disposal is huge. Given the limitations of traditional methods of data acquisition and considering the volume of relevant data available on the web, web data extraction is by far the easiest way to gather data required for market research. The shift of businesses from brick and mortar stores to online spaces has also made web data a better resource for market research.

4. Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis requires data extracted from websites where people share their reviews, opinions or complaints about services, products, movies, music or any other consumer focused offering. Extracting this user generated content would be the first step in any sentiment analysis project and web scraping serves the purpose efficiently.

5. Competitor analysis

The possibility of monitoring competition was never this accessible until web scraping technologies came along. By deploying web spiders, it’s now easy to closely monitor the activities of your competitors like the promotions they’re running, social media activity, marketing strategies, press releases, catalogs etc. in order to have the upper hand in competition. Near real time crawls take it a level further and provides businesses with real time competitor data.

6. Content aggregation

Media websites need instant access to breaking news and other trending information on the web on a continuous basis. Being quick at reporting news is a deal breaker for these companies. Web crawling makes it possible to monitor or extract data from popular news portals, forums or similar sites for trending topics or keywords that you want to monitor. Low latency web crawling is used for this use case as the update speed should be very high.

7. Brand monitoring

Every brand now understands the importance of customer focus for business growth. It would be in their best interests to have a clean reputation for their brand if they want to survive in this competitive market. Most companies are now using web crawling solutions to monitor popular forums, reviews on ecommerce sites and social media platforms for mentions of their brand and product names. This in turn can help them stay updated to the voice of the customer and fix issues that could ruin brand reputation at the earliest. There’s no doubt about a customer-focused business going up in the growth graph.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/ultimate-web-data-extraction-guide

Benefits of Acquiring Web Data Scrapper in Business

Benefits of Acquiring Web Data Scrapper in Business

Data is the most important thing required in today's marketing world. The data harvested can be utilized for multiple purposes in the world of marketing by numerous people. It is believed that the amount of data you have makes you stronger in the market against your competitors.

The only restriction in this process is how to get data from internet or how to extract data from website? To culminate this barrier of yours there are plenty of data scrapping devices available in this category. Well more than devices there are companies that provide data extracting services to fulfill user's requirement.

In these two extractors devices are far more reliable and self operative than organizations. There are plenty of benefits that a web data extractor provides in comparison to organizations. With data extractors you have the freedom to choose the topic of your own and get data from the websites. Were in an outsourcing they will provide you one thing at a time for which you will have to pursue again & again.

Numerous organizations have opted for the web data scrapper to discover specific information according to their requirement for instance. Site pages are fabricated utilizing content based imprint up dialects (HTML and XHTML), and much of the time contain an abundance of valuable information in content structure. Be that as it may, most site pages are intended for human end-clients and not for simplicity of mechanized use. In light of this, tool that rub web substance were made. A web scrapper is an API to concentrate information from a site.

Regularly, information exchange between projects is expert utilizing data structures suited for computerized handling by PCs, not individuals. Such exchange arrangements and conventions are normally inflexibly organized; all around recorded, effectively parsed, and keep vagueness to a base. All the time, these transmissions are not comprehensible by any stretch of the imagination. That is the reason the key component that recognizes information scratching from standard parsing is that the yield being scratched was expected for showcase to an end-client.

In all aspects data scrapping is better to be done by a tool rather than taking assistance of an organization.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/products-articles/benefits-acquiring-web-data-scrapper-business-1477753.html#ixzz4hnBWRp2z

The Manifold Advantages Of Investing In An Efficient Web Scraping Service

The Manifold Advantages Of Investing In An Efficient Web Scraping Service

Data Scraping Services is an extremely professional and effective online data mining service that would enable you to combine content from several webpages in a very quick and convenient method and deliver the content in any structure you may desire in the most accurate manner. Web scraping may be referred as web harvesting or data scraping a website and is the special method of extracting and assembling details from various websites with the help from web scraping tool along with web scraping software. It is also connected to web indexing that indexes details on the online web scraper utilizing bot (web scraping tool).

The dissimilarity is that web scraping is actually focused on obtaining unstructured details from diverse resources into a planned arrangement that can be utilized and saved, for instance a database or worksheet. Frequent services that utilize online web scraper are price-comparison sites or diverse kinds of mash-up websites. The most fundamental method for obtaining details from diverse resources is individual copy-paste. Nevertheless, the objective with Data Scraping Services is to create an effective web scraping software to the last element. Other methods comprise DOM parsing, upright aggregation platforms and even HTML parses. Web scraping might be in opposition to the conditions of usage of some sites. The enforceability of the terms is uncertain.

While complete replication of original content will in numerous cases is prohibited, in the United States, court ruled in Feist Publications v Rural Telephone Service that replication details is permissible. Bitrate service allows you to obtain specific details from the net without technical information; you just need to send the explanation of your explicit requirements by email and Bitrate will set everything up for you. The latest self-service is formatted through your preferred web browser and formation needs only necessary facts of either Ruby or Javascript. The main constituent of this web scraping tool is a thoughtfully made crawler that is very quick and simple to arrange. The web scraping software permits the users to identify domains, crawling tempo, filters and preparation making it extremely flexible. Every web page brought by the crawler is effectively processed by a draft that is accountable for extracting and arranging the essential content. Data scraping a website is configured with UI, and in the full-featured package this will be easily completed by Data Scraping. However, Data Scraping has two vital capabilities, which are:

- Data mining from sites to a planned custom-format (web scraping tool)

- Real-time assessment details on the internet.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/products-articles/manifold-advantages-investing-efficient-web-scraping-service-668690.html#ixzz4hDqL4EFk

Web Extraction – Extracting Web Data

Web Extraction – Extracting Web Data

Web extraction is a complex process of extracting web pages which often takes more time than expected, depending on quantity and quality of data to be extracted. Web grabber and web extractors are designed to locate URL's, crawl, web pages, contents, compare relevancy and than extract HTML-based data to MS Excel, CSV, XML, database or any text format.

Employing web extraction techniques, services and tools help capture large volume of valuable information from un-structured resources, databases quickly regardless of time and place and it could be stored in different formats which in turns analyzed by intellectuals and used to meet day to day business challenges.

Corporate Houses and Business Often Employ or Outsource Web Extraction Projects to Companies to Get Access of Desired Data For Purposes Like:

• Web extraction for competitive analysis
• Website extraction
• Web extraction for sales legal generation
• Data extraction for web automation
• Web extraction for business intelligence
• E commerce web data extraction
• Extract images and files
• Extracted data in the required format
• Social media website, data extraction
• Collecting reviews on product and services
• Business process re-engineering
• Gathering a large amount of structured data
• Web 2.0 data extraction
• Online Social Network users detail, behavior extraction
• Extracting data to analyzing human behavior

Web extraction provides scalable online marketing intelligence to business. Outsourcing professional web extractors help get end-to-end business data solutions with in a matter of few hours. Accuracy and reliability of data extracted by professionals is on higher side compared to automation tools only.

Source:http://dataextractionservicesindia.blogspot.in/2013/03/web-extraction-extracting-web-data.html

Know about what is screen scraping!

Know about what is screen scraping!

In present scenario, world is becoming hugely competitive. Business owners always look excited to get benefits as well as best results. They are eager to grow their business hugely as well as effective manner. Currently, majority of businessmen are available online. There are several industries that are available over the web today and trying to make effective promotion of their products as well as services with the support of their particular websites. Majority of people are now using internet services for several purposes. People use online facilities to get contact details of other users. More to the point, businessmen usually look excited to get software that can make them able to get the preferred data in an instant manner. In this case, screen scraping tool will be the best option among all. At present, there are a number of people who are excited to know that What Is Screen Scraping . As far as screen scrapping is concerned, it is a process that makes you able to extract huge data from website in a very little time.

There would be really no other best option instead of screen scraping software when it comes to mining huge amount of data from websites in a very short time. This specific program is getting huge attention of the people nowadays. This program is extremely capable to extract huge amount of data from websites in a matter of seconds. It has helped business professionals a lot in terms of growing their popularity and benefit both. With the support of this program, one can easily extract relevant data in a hassle-free manner. Not only this, this software can also easily drag out large files from the websites. Moreover, this software is also capable to drag images from some particular website with so much ease.

This software can not only be used for the purpose of extracting data from websites but also you can submit and fill forms with its support. There is need of too much time when it comes to filling or copying the data manually. This software is now a renowned as well as one of the fastest means of extracting data from websites. This software not only helpful in simplifying data extraction process but also helps websites to become friendlier for the users. To know more about what is screen scrapping, one can also take help of internet facility to fulfill their purpose.

Source:http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/6086054?articleid=6086054

Web Scraping: Top 15 Ways To Use It For Business.

Web Scraping: Top 15 Ways To Use It For Business.

Web Scraping also commonly known as Web Data extraction / Web Harvesting / Screen Scrapping is a technology which is loved by startups, small and big companies. In simple words it is actually an automation technique to extract the unorganized web data into manageable format, where the data is extracted by traversing each URL by the robot and then using REGEX, CSS, XPATH or some other technique to extract the desired information in choice of output format.

So, it's a process of collecting information automatically from the World Wide Web. Current web scraping solutions range from the ad-hoc, requiring human effort, to even fully automated systems that are able to convert entire web sites into structured information. Using Web Scraper you can build sitemaps that will navigate the site and extract the data. Using different type of selectors the Web Scraper will navigate the site and extract multiple types of data - text, tables, images, links and more.

Here are 20 ways to use web scraping in your business.

 1. Scrape products & price for comparison site – The site specific web crawling websites or the price comparison websites crawl the stores website prices, product description and images to get the data for analytic, affiliation or comparison.  It has also been proved that pricing optimization techniques can improve gross profit margins by almost 10%. Selling products at a competitive rate all the time is a really crucial aspect of e-commerce. Web crawling is also used by travel, e-commerce companies to extract prices from airlines’ websites in real time since a long time. By creating your custom scraping agent you can extract product feeds, images, price and other all associated details regarding the product from multiple sites and create your own data-ware house or price comparison site. For example trivago.com

2. Online presence can be tracked- That’s also an important aspect of web scraping where business profiles and reviews on the websites can be scrapped. This can be used to see the performance of the product, the user behavior and reaction. The web scraping could list and check thousands of the user profiles and the reviews which can be really useful for the business analytics.

3. Custom Analysis and curation- This one is basically for the new websites/ channels wherein the scrapped data can be helpful for the channels in knowing the viewer behavior. This is done with the goal of providing targeted news to the audience. Thus what you watch online gives the behavioral pattern to the website so they know their audience and offer what actually the audience like.

4. Online Reputation - In this world of digitalization companies are bullish about the spent on the online reputation management. Thus the web scrapping is essential here as well. When you plan your ORM strategy the scrapped data helps you to understand which audiences you most hope to impact and what areas of liability can most open your brand up to reputation damage. The web crawler could reveal opinion leaders, trending topics and demographic facts like gender, age group, GEO location, and sentiment in text. By understanding these areas of vulnerability, you can use them to your greatest advantage.

5. Detect fraudulent reviews - It has become a common practice for people to read online opinions and reviews for different purposes. Thus it’s important to figure out the Opinion Spamming: It refers to "illegal" activities example writing fake reviews on the portals. It is also called shilling, which tries to mislead readers. Thus the web scrapping can be helpful crawling the reviews and detecting which one to block, to be verified, or streamline the experience.

6. To provide better targeted ads to your customers- The scrapping not only gives you numbers but also the sentiments and behavioral analytic thus you know the audience types and the choice of ads they would want to see.

7. Business specific scrapping – Taking doctors for example: you can scrape health physicians or doctors from their clinic websites to provide a catalog of available doctors as per specialization and region or any other specification.
  
8. To gather public opinion- Monitor specific company pages from social networks to gather updates for what people are saying about certain companies and their products. Data collection is always useful for the product’s growth.
  
9. Search engine results for SEO tracking- By scraping organic search results you can quickly find out your SEO competitors for a particular search term. You can determine the title tags and the keywords they are targeting. Thus you get an idea of which keywords are driving traffic to a website, which content categories are attracting links and user engagement, what kind of resources will it take to rank your site.

10. Price competitiveness- It tracks the stock availability and prices of products in one of the most frequent ways and sends notifications whenever there is a change in competitors' prices or   in the market. In ecommerce, Retailers or marketplaces use web scraping not only to monitor their competitor prices but also to improve their product attributes.  To stay on top of their direct competitors, nowadays e-commerce sites have started closely monitoring their counterparts. For example, say Amazon would want to know how their products are performing against Flipkart or Walmart, and whether their product coverage is complete. Towards this end, they would want to crawl product catalogs from these two sites to find the gaps in their catalog. They’d also want to stay updated about whether they’re running any promotions on any of the products or categories. This helps in gaining actionable insights that can be implemented in their own pricing decisions. Apart from promotions, sites are also interested in finding out details such as shipping times, number of sellers, availability, similar products (recommendations) etc. for identical products.

11. Scrape leads- This is another important use for the sales driven organization wherein lead generation is done. Sales teams are always hungry for data and with the help of the web scrapping technique you can scrap leads from directories such as Yelp, Sulekha, Just Dial, Yellow Pages etc. and then contact them to make a sales introduction. To crapes complete information about the business profile, address, email, phone, products/services, working hours, Geo codes, etc. The data can be taken out in the desired format and can be used for lead generation, brand building or other purposes..
 
12. For events organization – You can scrape events from thousands of event websites in the US to create an application that consolidates all of the events together.

13. Job scraping sites : Job sites are also using scrapping to list all the data in one place. They scrape different company websites or jobs sites to create a central job board website and have a list of companies that are currently hiring to contact. There is also a method to use Google with LinkedIn to get lists of people by company which are geo-targeted by this data.  The only thing that was difficult was to extract from the professional social networking site is contact details,  although now they are readily available through other sources by writing scraping scripts methods to collate this data. For example naukri.com

14. Online reputation management : Do you know 50% of consumers read reviews before deciding to book a hotel. Now scrape review, ratings and comments from multiple websites to understand the customer sentiments and analyze with your favorite tool.

15. To build vertical specific search engines- This is new thing popular in the market but again for this a lot of data is needed hence web scrapping is done for as much public data as possible because this volume of data is practically impossible to gather.

Web scraping can be used to power up the following businesses like Social media monitoring Travel sites, Lead generation, E-commerce, Events listings, Price comparison, Finance, Reputation monitoring and the list is never ending
Each business has competition in the present world, so companies scrape their competitor information regularly to monitor the movements. In the era of big data, applications of web scraping is endless. Depending on your business, you can find a lot of area where web data can be of great use.  Web scraping is thus an art which is use to make data gathering automated and fast.

Source:https://www.datascraping.co/doc/articles/86/businesses-use-of-web-scraping

What is Web Scraping Services ?

What is Web Scraping Services ?

Web scraping is essentially a service where an algorithm driven process fetches relevant data from the depths of the internet and stores it on a centralized location (think excel sheets) which can be analyzed to draw meaningful and strategic insight.

To put things into perspective, imagine the internet as a large tank cluttered with trillions of tons of data. Now, imagine instructing something as small as a spider to go and fetch all data relevant to your business. The spider works in accordance with the instructions and starts digging deep into the tank, fetching data with an objective orientation, requesting for data wherever it is protected by a keeper and being a small spider, it fetches data even from the most granular nook and corner of the tank. Now, this spider has a briefcase where it stores all collected data in a systematic manner and returns to you after its exploration into the deep internet tank. What you have now is perfectly the data you need in a perfectly understandable format. This is exactly what a web scraping service entails except the fact that it also promises working on those briefcase data and cleaning it up for redundancies and errors and presents it to you in the form of a well consumption-ready information format and not raw unprocessed data.

Now, there is a high possibility that you may be wondering how else can you utilize this data to extract the best RoI- Return on Investment.

Here's just a handful of the most popular beneficial uses of web scraping services-

Competition Analysis

The best part about having aggressive competitors is that you just by alert monitoring of their activities, you can outpace them by enhancing off of their big move. The industries are growing rapidly, only the informed are ahead of the race.

Data Cumulation

Web scraping ensures aggregating of all data in a centralized location. Say goodbye to the cumbersome process of collecting bits and pieces of raw data and spending the night trying to make sense out of it.

Supply-chain Monitoring

While decentralization is good, the boss needs to do what a boss does- hold the reins. Track your distributors who blatantly ignore your list prices and web miscreants who are out with a mission to destroy your brand. It’s time to take charge.

Pricing Strategy

Pricing is of the most crucial aspect in the product mix and your business model- you get only one chance to make it or break it. Stay ahead of the incumbents by monitoring their pricing strategy and make the final cut to stay ahead of time.

Delta Analytics

The top tip to stay ahead in the game is to keep all your senses open to receive any change. Stay updated about everything happening around your sphere of interest and stay ahead by planning and responding to prospective changes.

Market Understanding

Understand your market well. Web scraping as a service offers you the information you need to be abreast of the continuous evolution of your market, your competitors’ responses and the dynamic preferences of your customer.

Lead Generation

We all know that a customer is the sole reason for the existence of a product or business. Lead generation is the first step to acquiring a customer. The simple equation is that more the number of leads, higher is the aggregate conversion of customers. Web scraping as a service entails receiving and creating a relevant – relevant is the key word – relevant lead generation. It is always better to target someone who is interested or needs to avail the services or product you offer.

Data Enhancement

With web extraction services, you can extract more juice out of the data you have. The ready to consume format of information that web scraping services offer allows you to match it with other relevant data points to connect the dots and draw insights for the bigger picture.

Review Analysis

Continuous improvement is the key to building a successful brand and consumer feedback is of the prime sources that will let you know where you stand in terms of the goal – customer satisfaction. Web scraping services offer a segue to understanding your customers’ review and help you stay ahead of the game by improvising.

Financial Intelligence

In the dynamic industry of finance and ever-volatile investment industry, know what’s the best use of your money. After all, the whole drama is for the money. Web scraping services offer you the benefit of using alternative data to plan your finances much more efficiently.

Research Process

The information derived from a web scraping process is almost ready to be run through for a research and analysis function. Focus on the research instead of data collection and management.

Risk & Regulations Compliance

Understanding risk and evolving regulations is important to avoid any market or legal trap. Stay updated with the evolving dynamics of the regulatory framework and the possible risks that mean significantly for your business.

Botscraper ensures that all your web scraping process is done with utmost diligence and efficiency. We at Botscraper have a single aim -  your success and we know exactly what to deliver to ensure that.

Source:http://www.botscraper.com/blog/What-is-web-scraping-service-

Web Data Extraction Services Derive Data from Huge Sources of Information

Web Data Extraction Services Derive Data from Huge Sources of Information

Statistics show that the number of websites exceeded 1 billion and will exceed this figure by 2016. Even considering that only 25% are active the number is staggering. In this there are thousands of categories dedicated to virtually all subjects under the Sun. For people who want information the internet is a boon because they can get the latest data and detailed information on the topic of their interest. Anyone who does not know how complex the web is would think that a simple Google search is all they need to get their hands on information. It is only when they actually do it that they realize how frustrating it is to actually get to sites that contain genuine information and not promotional materials.

Out there people have access to not just gigabytes of data but terabytes out of which data that serves their purpose may only be in megabytes but to get to this it requires accessing not one but thousands of websites and extracting data. The task is easy for web data extraction services since keywords and a few other parameters and the software do they use automated web data extraction software. The operator simply inputs filters, defines es the rest. The software will carry out automatic searches based on inputs and will access thousands of sites and voluminous amounts of data. From this huge mountain of data it extracts only the specific bits of information required by the end user. The rest is discarded.

How is this advantageous to the end user?

In the normal course the end user if left to extract web data on his own would not have the time or patience to visit hundreds or thousands of websites. It would take more than a couple of months. Even assuming he did visit websites, he would be up against blocks put up by the administrators that would prevent him from accessing or downloading the data. Third, even if he did manage to obtain information, he would have to refine it-a painstaking and time consuming task. All these headaches are short-circuited by the use of web data extraction software. He sits back, carries on with his usual work and the information he seeks is delivered to him by the web extraction service. The extraction tool they use accesses thousands of sites, even password protected sites and sites with automatic blocks against repeated attempts. Since it is automated it can access one website after another in quick succession and download data in the multi-threaded mode. It will run unattended for hours and days, all the while sifting through terabytes of data and exporting refined data into a predefined format. An end user gets more meaningful data he can work on immediately and be even more productive.

If web data extraction services are popular and accepted it is only because they deliver meaningful data. They can only do this if they have the tools to access the huge number of websites, ferret out the data from the voluminous mass and present it all in a usable format, all of which is easy when they use the extractor tool.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/technology-articles/software-articles/web-data-extraction-services-derive-data-huge-sources-information-1417142.html

Some Of The Most Reason Product Data scraping Services

Some Of The Most Reason Product Data scraping Services

There are literally around the world that is relatively easy to use thousands of free proxy servers. But the trick is finding them. There are hundreds of servers in multiple sites, but to find, and is compatible with a variety of protocols, persistence, testing, trial and error is a lesson that can be. But if you work behind the scenes of the audience will find a pool, there are risks involved in its use.

First, you do not know what activities are going on the server or elsewhere on the server. Sensitive data sent through a public proxy or the request is a bad idea. After performing a simple search on Google, the scraping of the anonymous proxy server provides enterprises gegevens.kon quickly found. Some are beginning to extract information from PDF. It is often called PDF scraping, scraping as the process has just obtained the information contained in PDF files.

It has never been done? The business and use the patented scraping a patent search. Select the U.S. Patent Office was opened an inventor in the United States is the best product on the database and displays all media in their mouths. The question is: Can I do a patent search to see if my invention ahead of time and money to promote their intellectual property?

When viewed in a Web patents may apply to be a very difficult process. For example, "dog" and "food" the study database after the 5745 patents in the study. Cookies and may take some time! Patents, more than the number of results from the database search results. Enter the picture. Download and see pictures from the Internet while on the Internet, and can be used as the database server as well as their own research.

A patent application takes a long time, many companies and organizations looking for ways to improve the process. A number of organizations and companies, whose sole purpose is for them to do a patent search to recruit workers. Burdens on small companies specializing in contract research and other patents. of modern technology to conduct research in a patent called the pod.

Since the script will automatically look for patents held, and accurate information to employees, can play an important role in the scrape of the patent! Give beer techniques can remove the picture from the message.

Put a face in the real world; let's look at the pharmaceutical industry. Enter the number of the next big drug companies. The Met will use this information, or the company can be in front, heavy, or rotate in the opposite direction. It would be too expensive for one day to do a patent search for a team of researchers is dedicated to maintaining. Patent technology to meet the ideas and techniques that came before the media.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/business-articles/some-most-reason-product-data-scraping-services-972602.html

Web Data Extraction Services, Save Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Web Data Extraction Services, Save Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Scrape data from web site using the method of data retrieval is the only proven program. As one of the Internet industry, which is all important data in the world as a variety of desires for any purpose can use the data extracted? We offer the best web extraction software. We expertise in Web and data mining, slaughter of image, a type of screen finish is the knowledge of email services, data mining, extract, capture web.

You can use data services, scratching?
Scraping and data extraction can be used in any organization, corporation, or any company which is a data set targeted customer industry, company, or anything that is available on the net as some data, such as e-ID mail data, site name, search term or what is available on the web. In most cases, data scraping and data mining services, not a product of industry, are marketed and used for example to reach targeted customers as a marketing company, if company X, the city has a restaurant in California, the software relationship that the city's restaurants in California and use that information for marketing your product to market-type restaurant company can extract the data. MLM and marketing network using data mining and data services to each potential customer for a new client by extracting the data, and call customer service, postcard, e-mail marketing, and thus produce large networks to send large groups of construction companies and their products.
Helped many companies ask a high that some data, it seems.

Web data extraction

Web pages created based markup text (HTML and XHTML) language and often contain many useful information such as text. However, at the end the most humane of the site and not an automatic is easy to use. For this reason, tool kit, scrape the Web content that has been created. API of a web scraper for extracting data from a Web page. We API as necessary to scrape the data to create a way to help. We provide quality and affordable web applications for data retrieval

Data collection

generally; the transfer of data between programs using structures processing of information, suitable for human computer can be completed. These data exchange formats and protocols are usually strictly structured, well documented, easy to read, and keep to a minimum of ambiguity. Very often, these engines are not human-readable at all. Therefore, a systematic analysis of the key element that separates the data scraping, the result is a screen scraped for end users.

E-Mail Extracto

A tool that lets you retrieve e-mail id of any sound source, called automatically by e-mail extractor. In fact, collection services, the various web pages, HTML files, text files, or e-mail IDs are not duplicated in any other form of contact is provided for business.

Finish Screen

screen scraping a computer screen in the terminal to read the text and visual data sources to gather practical information, instead of the analysis band data scraping.

Data Mining Services

Services of data mining is the process of extracting the information structure. Data mining tool increasingly important for the transfer of information data. MS Excel, CSV, HTML, and many of these forms according to your needs, including any form.

Spider We

A spider is a computer program, which is navigation in a systematic and automated or sound is the World Wide Web. Many sites, particularly search engine, spidering as a means of providing timely data to use.

Web Grabbe

Web Grabber is just another name for data scraping or data extraction.

Web Bot

Web Bot program for predicting future events is claimed to be able to track the keywords you enter the Internet. To the best of the web bot software on several of these articles, blogs, website content, website and retrieve data information program, logging data retrieval and data mining services have worked with many customers, they really satisfied with the quality of services and information on the task force is very easy and automatic.

Source: https://www.isnare.com/?aid=835156&ca=Internet

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Data-Mining---How-Does-it-Help-Businesses?&id=3860679

Things to know about web scraping

Things to know about web scraping

First things first, it is important to understand what web scraping means and what is its purpose. Web scraping is a computer software technique through which people can extract information and content from various websites. The main purpose is to use that information in a way that the site owner does not have direct control over it. Most people use web scraping in order to turn commercial advantage of their competitors into their own.

There are many scraping tools available on the Internet, but because some people might think that web scraping goes long beyond their duties, many small companies that provide this type of services have appeared on the market. This way, you can turn this challenging and complex process into an easy web scraping one, which, believe it or not, exists for nearly as long as the web. All you have to do is some quick research on the Internet and find the best consultant that is willing to help you with this matter. When it comes to the industries that web scraping is targeting, it is worth mentioning that some of them prevail over others. One good example is digital publishers and directories. They are one of the easiest targets for web scrappers, because most of their intellectual property is available to a large number of people. Industries like travel or real estate are also a good place for scraping, along with ecommerce, which is an obvious target too. Time-limited promotions and even flash sales are the reasons why ecommerce is seen as a candy by web scrapers.

Source: http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/6196289?articleid=6196289

Data Mining Basics

Data Mining Basics

Definition and Purpose of Data Mining:

Data mining is a relatively new term that refers to the process by which predictive patterns are extracted from information.

Data is often stored in large, relational databases and the amount of information stored can be substantial. But what does this data mean? How can a company or organization figure out patterns that are critical to its performance and then take action based on these patterns? To manually wade through the information stored in a large database and then figure out what is important to your organization can be next to impossible.

This is where data mining techniques come to the rescue! Data mining software analyzes huge quantities of data and then determines predictive patterns by examining relationships.

Data Mining Techniques:

There are numerous data mining (DM) techniques and the type of data being examined strongly influences the type of data mining technique used.

Note that the nature of data mining is constantly evolving and new DM techniques are being implemented all the time.

Generally speaking, there are several main techniques used by data mining software: clustering, classification, regression and association methods.

Clustering:

Clustering refers to the formation of data clusters that are grouped together by some sort of relationship that identifies that data as being similar. An example of this would be sales data that is clustered into specific markets.

Classification:

Data is grouped together by applying known structure to the data warehouse being examined. This method is great for categorical information and uses one or more algorithms such as decision tree learning, neural networks and "nearest neighbor" methods.

Regression:

Regression utilizes mathematical formulas and is superb for numerical information. It basically looks at the numerical data and then attempts to apply a formula that fits that data.

New data can then be plugged into the formula, which results in predictive analysis.

Association:

Often referred to as "association rule learning," this method is popular and entails the discovery of interesting relationships between variables in the data warehouse (where the data is stored for analysis). Once an association "rule" has been established, predictions can then be made and acted upon. An example of this is shopping: if people buy a particular item then there may be a high chance that they also buy another specific item (the store manager could then make sure these items are located near each other).

Data Mining and the Business Intelligence Stack:

Business intelligence refers to the gathering, storing and analyzing of data for the purpose of making intelligent business decisions. Business intelligence is commonly divided into several layers, all of which constitute the business intelligence "stack."

The BI (business intelligence) stack consists of: a data layer, analytics layer and presentation layer.

The analytics layer is responsible for data analysis and it is this layer where data mining occurs within the stack. Other elements that are part of the analytics layer are predictive analysis and KPI (key performance indicator) formation.

Data mining is a critical part of business intelligence, providing key relationships between groups of data that is then displayed to end users via data visualization (part of the BI stack's presentation layer). Individuals can then quickly view these relationships in a graphical manner and take some sort of action based on the data being displayed.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-Basics&id=5120773

Make PDF Files Accessible With Data Scrapping

Make PDF Files Accessible With Data Scrapping

What is Data Scrapping?

In your daily business activities, you should have heard about data scrapping. It is a process of extracting data, content or information from a Portable Document Format file. There are easy to use as well as advanced tools available that can automatically sort the data which can be founded on different sources such as Internet. These tools can collect relevant information or data according to the needs of a user. A user just need to type in the keywords or key phrases and the tools can extract related information from a Portable Document Format file. It is a useful method to make the information or the data available from the non editable files.

How can you perform data scrapping and make PDF files accessible or viewable?

There are many advantages of storing as well as sharing the information with PDF files. A Portable Document Format protects the originality of the document when you convert the data from Word to PDF. The compression algorithms compress the size of the file whenever the files become heavier due to the content. The graphics or images mainly add to the file size and creates problems when had to transfer the files. A Portable Document Format is a file that is independent of hardware or software for installation purposes. It is also self-reliant when it has to be operated or accessed on any system with different configuration. You can even encrypt the files with the help of computer programs. This enhances your ability to protect the content.

Along with many benefits, there are other challenges while using a Portable Document Format computer application. For instance, you have found a PDF file on the Internet and you want to access the data for utilizing it for a project. If the author has encrypted the file that prevents you from copying or printing the file, you can easily use the computer programs for scrapping purpose. These programs are easily available over the Internet with a variety of features and functionality. In this way, you can extract valuable information from different sources for constructive purpose.

 Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Make-PDF-Files-Accessible-With-Data-Scrapping&id=4692776

Searching the Web Using Text Mining and Data Mining

Searching the Web Using Text Mining and Data Mining

There are many types of financial analysis tools that are useful for various purposes. Most of these are easily available online. Two such tools of software for financial analysis include the text mining and data mining. Both methods have been discussed in details in the following section.

The features of Text Mining It is a way by which information of high-quality can be derived from a text. It involves giving structure to the input text then deriving patterns within the data that has been structured. Finally, the process of evaluating and interpreting the output is undertaken.

This form of mining usually involves the process of structuring the text input, and deriving patterns within the structured data, and finally evaluating and interpreting the data. It differs from the way we are familiar with in searching the web. The goal of this method is to find unknown information. It can be done with analyses in topics that that were not researched before.

What is Data Mining? It is the process of the extraction of patterns from the data. Nowadays, it has become very vital to transform this data into information. It is particularly used in marketing practices as well as fraud detection and surveillance. We can extract hidden information from huge databases of information. It can be used to predict future trends as well as to aid the company business to make knowledgeable quick decisions.

Working of data mining: Modeling technique is used to perform the operation of such form of mining. For these techniques, you must need to be fully integrated with a data warehouse as well as financial analysis tools. Some of the areas where this method is used are:

 - Pharmaceutical companies which need to analyze its sales force and to achieve their targets.
 - Credit card companies and transportation companies with sales force.
 - Also large consumer goods companies use such mining techniques.
 - With this method, a retailer may utilize POS or point-of-sale data of customer purchases in order to develop  strategies for sale promotion.

The major elements of Data mining:

1. Extracting, transforming, and sending load transaction data on the data warehouse of the server system.

2. Storing and managing the data in for database systems that are multidimensional in nature.

3. Presenting data to the IT professionals and business analysts for processing.

4. Presenting the data to the application software for analyses.

5. Presentation of the data in dynamic ways like graph or table.

The main point of difference between the two types of mining is that text mining checks the patterns from natural text instead of databases where the data is structured.

Data mining software supports the entire process of such mining and discovery of knowledge. These are available on the internet. Data mining software serves as one of the best financial analysis tools. You can avail of data mining software suites and their reviews freely over the internet and easily compare between them.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Searching-the-Web-Using-Text-Mining-and-Data-Mining&id=5299621

Searching the Web Using Text Mining and Data Mining

Searching the Web Using Text Mining and Data Mining

There are many types of financial analysis tools that are useful for various purposes. Most of these are easily available online. Two such tools of software for financial analysis include the text mining and data mining. Both methods have been discussed in details in the following section.

The features of Text Mining It is a way by which information of high-quality can be derived from a text. It involves giving structure to the input text then deriving patterns within the data that has been structured. Finally, the process of evaluating and interpreting the output is undertaken.

This form of mining usually involves the process of structuring the text input, and deriving patterns within the structured data, and finally evaluating and interpreting the data. It differs from the way we are familiar with in searching the web. The goal of this method is to find unknown information. It can be done with analyses in topics that that were not researched before.

What is Data Mining? It is the process of the extraction of patterns from the data. Nowadays, it has become very vital to transform this data into information. It is particularly used in marketing practices as well as fraud detection and surveillance. We can extract hidden information from huge databases of information. It can be used to predict future trends as well as to aid the company business to make knowledgeable quick decisions.

Working of data mining: Modeling technique is used to perform the operation of such form of mining. For these techniques, you must need to be fully integrated with a data warehouse as well as financial analysis tools. Some of the areas where this method is used are:

 - Pharmaceutical companies which need to analyze its sales force and to achieve their targets.
 - Credit card companies and transportation companies with sales force.
 - Also large consumer goods companies use such mining techniques.
 - With this method, a retailer may utilize POS or point-of-sale data of customer purchases in order to develop  strategies for sale promotion.

The major elements of Data mining:

1. Extracting, transforming, and sending load transaction data on the data warehouse of the server system.

2. Storing and managing the data in for database systems that are multidimensional in nature.

3. Presenting data to the IT professionals and business analysts for processing.

4. Presenting the data to the application software for analyses.

5. Presentation of the data in dynamic ways like graph or table.

The main point of difference between the two types of mining is that text mining checks the patterns from natural text instead of databases where the data is structured.

Data mining software supports the entire process of such mining and discovery of knowledge. These are available on the internet. Data mining software serves as one of the best financial analysis tools. You can avail of data mining software suites and their reviews freely over the internet and easily compare between them.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Searching-the-Web-Using-Text-Mining-and-Data-Mining&id=5299621

Using Charts For Effective Data Mining

Using Charts For Effective Data Mining

The modern world is one where data is gathered voraciously. Modern computers with all their advanced hardware and software are bringing all of this data to our fingertips. In fact one survey says that the amount of data gathered is doubled every year. That is quite some data to understand and analyze. And this means a lot of time, effort and money. That is where advancements in the field of Data Mining have proven to be so useful.

Data mining is basically a process of identifying underlying patters and relationships among sets of data that are not apparent at first glance. It is a method by which large and unorganized amounts of data are analyzed to find underlying connections which might give the analyzer useful insight into the data being analyzed.

It's uses are varied. In marketing it can be used to reach a product to a particular customer. For example, suppose a supermarket while mining through their records notices customers preferring to buy a particular brand of a particular product. The supermarket can then promote that product even further by giving discounts, promotional offers etc. related to that product. A medical researcher analyzing D.N.A strands can and will have to use data mining to find relationships existing among the strands. Apart from bio-informatics, data mining has found applications in several other fields like genetics, pure medicine, engineering, even education.

The Internet is also a domain where mining is used extensively. The world wide web is a minefield of information. This information needs to be sorted, grouped and analyzed. Data Mining is used extensively here. For example one of the most important aspects of the net is search. Everyday several million people search for information over the world wide web. If each search query is to be stored then extensively large amounts of data will be generated. Mining can then be used to analyze all of this data and help return better and more direct search results which lead to better usability of the Internet.

Data mining requires advanced techniques to implement. Statistical models, mathematical algorithms or the more modern machine learning methods may be used to sift through tons and tons of data in order to make sense of it all.

Foremost among these is the method of charting. Here data is plotted in the form of charts and graphs. Data visualization, as it is often referred to is a tried and tested technique of data mining. If visually depicted, data easily reveals relationships that would otherwise be hidden. Bar charts, pie charts, line charts, scatter plots, bubble charts etc. provide simple, easy techniques for data mining.

Thus a clear simple truth emerges. In today's world of heavy load data, mining it is necessary. And charts and graphs are one of the surest methods of doing this. And if current trends are anything to go by the importance of data mining cannot be undermined in any way in the near future.

Source : http://ezinearticles.com/?Using-Charts-For-Effective-Data-Mining&id=2644996