Pros and Cons of Web Scraping Software

There is a bunch of informative data which is only available on web portals. However, generally people try to copy the data into functional database or spreadsheet which can be a really tiring process. Data copying or entry from web portal can easily become cost exorbitant as the working hours add up. Undoubtedly, a programmed method for gathering the usable database from HTML centred web portals can offer huge administration cost savings. There are website scraping software which can help extracting usable information from the Internet. These web portals are able to traverse the web, assessing the contents of the site, and then extract the data from website for the purpose of comparing or something else. Some companies use the website scraping software for purposes like comparing the prices of the products, carrying out online research ,or pursuing variations to online content.

Just take a look at how Web scraping software can support data collection and management for variety of purposes:

• Using copy and paste or simply typing the data from a website can be extremely costly and time consuming. Website scraping software can easily traverse through a chain of websites, make conclusions for what information is important and what is not and then copying the data into a structured spreadsheet, relational database, or other programs. Every operator can efficiently act as their own programmer to expand the abilities to process website portals.

• The company can easily show their products price, availability and other useful information in a way easily manipulated with web scraping software by analysing online catalogue.

• Management of figures and numerals is done through spreadsheets and databases; however data on a web portal configured in HTML is not easily accessible for such purposes. Though, websites are superb for showing facts and figures they fall down when they need to be analysed or sorted.

Though these are useful software, but there are few challenges in front of these soft wares also:

• Web masters generally keep changing their websites for better functionality, anda friendlieruser experience that in turn breaks the logic of the web scraping software.

• If someone regularly scrapes something from a website through scraping software there is chance of your IP getting blocked. If same IP is used for scraping regularly, one day, the network security team will block your IP.

• Websites are getting better and are using more advanced ways to display data because of this it is becoming harder to scrape data off the websites, unless you are an expert.