Web scraping Services | Email Scraping Services | Data mining Services

Web scraping Services | Email Scraping Services | Data mining Services

Web scraping (web harvesting or web data extraction) is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Usually, such software programs simulate human exploration of the World Wide Web by either implementing low-level Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or embedding a fully-fledged web browser, such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

Web scraping is closely related to web indexing, which indexes information on the web using a bot or web crawler and is a universal technique adopted by most search engines. In contrast, web scraping focuses more on the transformation of unstructured data on the web, typically in HTML format, into structured data that can be stored and analyzed in a central local database or spreadsheet. Web scraping is also related to web automation, which simulates human browsing using computer software. Uses of web scraping include online price comparison, contact scraping, weather data monitoring, website change detection, research, web mashup and web data integration.

Techniques

Web scraping is the process of automatically collecting information from the World Wide Web. It is a field with active developments sharing a common goal with the semantic web vision, an ambitious initiative that still requires breakthroughs in text processing, semantic understanding, artificial intelligence and human-computer interactions. Current web scraping solutions range from the ad-hoc, requiring human effort, to fully automated systems that are able to convert entire web sites into structured information, with limitations.

1.
Human copy-and-paste: Sometimes even the best web-scraping technology cannot replace a human’s manual examination and copy-and-paste, and sometimes this may be the only workable solution when the websites for scraping explicitly set up barriers to prevent machine automation.

2.
Text grepping and regular expression matching: A simple yet powerful approach to extract information from web pages can be based on the UNIX grep command or regular expression-matching facilities of programming languages (for instance Perl or Python).

3.
HTTP programming: Static and dynamic web pages can be retrieved by posting HTTP requests to the remote web server using socket programming.

4.
HTML parsers: Many websites have large collections of pages generated dynamically from an underlying structured source like a database. Data of the same category are typically encoded into similar pages by a common script or template. In data mining, a program that detects such templates in a particular information source, extracts its content and translates it into a relational form, is called a wrapper. Wrapper generation algorithms assume that input pages of a wrapper induction system conform to a common template and that they can be easily identified in terms of a URL common scheme. Moreover, some semi-structured data query languages, such as XQuery and the HTQL, can be used to parse HTML pages and to retrieve and transform page content.

5.
DOM parsing: By embedding a full-fledged web browser, such as the Internet Explorer or the Mozilla browser control, programs can retrieve the dynamic content generated by client-side scripts. These browser controls also parse web pages into a DOM tree, based on which programs can retrieve parts of the pages.

6.
Web-scraping software: There are many software tools available that can be used to customize web-scraping solutions. This software may attempt to automatically recognize the data structure of a page or provide a recording interface that removes the necessity to manually write web-scraping code, or some scripting functions that can be used to extract and transform content, and database interfaces that can store the scraped data in local databases.

7.
Vertical aggregation platforms: There are several companies that have developed vertical specific harvesting platforms. These platforms create and monitor a multitude of “bots” for specific verticals with no "man in the loop" (no direct human involvement), and no work related to a specific target site. The preparation involves establishing the knowledge base for the entire vertical and then the platform creates the bots automatically. The platform's robustness is measured by the quality of the information it retrieves (usually number of fields) and its scalability (how quick it can scale up to hundreds or thousands of sites). This scalability is mostly used to target the Long Tail of sites that common aggregators find complicated or too labor-intensive to harvest content from.

8.
Semantic annotation recognizing: The pages being scraped may embrace metadata or semantic markups and annotations, which can be used to locate specific data snippets. If the annotations are embedded in the pages, as Microformat does, this technique can be viewed as a special case of DOM parsing. In another case, the annotations, organized into a semantic layer, are stored and managed separately from the web pages, so the scrapers can retrieve data schema and instructions from this layer before scraping the pages.

9.
Computer vision web-page analyzers: There are efforts using machine learning and computer vision that attempt to identify and extract information from web pages by interpreting pages visually as a human being might

Source:http://research.omicsgroup.org/index.php/Data_scraping

How Web Scraping Services Help Businesses to Do Better?

How Web Scraping Services Help Businesses to Do Better?

Web scraping services help in growing business as well as reaching business to the new success and heights. Data scraping services is the procedure to extract data from the websites like eBay for different business requirements. This gives high quality and accurate data which serves all your business requirements, track your opponents and convert you into decision maker. In addition, eBay web scraping services offer you data in the customized format and extremely cost effective too. It gives you easy way in of website data in the organized and resourceful manner that you can utilize the data for taking knowledgeable decision which is very important for the business.

Also, it creates new opportunities for monetizing online data as well as really suitable for the people that want to begin with lesser investment yet dreaming about enormous success of their business. Other advantages of eBay web scraping services include Lead Generation, Price Comparison, Competition Tracking, Consumer Behavior Tracking, and Data for online stores.

Data Extraction can be defined as the process of retrieving data from an unstructured source in order to process it further or store it. It is very useful for large organizations who deal with large amount of data on a daily basis that need to be processed into meaningful information and stored for later use. The data extraction is a systematic way to extract and structure data from scattered and semi-structured electronic documents, as found on the web and in various data warehouses.

In today's highly competitive business world, vital business information such as customer statistics, competitor's operational figures and inter-company sales figures play an important role in making strategic decisions. By signing on this service provider, you will be get access to critivcal data from various sources like websites, databases, images and documents.

It can help you take strategic business decisions that can shape your business' goals. Whether you need customer information, nuggets into your competitor's operations and figure out your organization's performance, it is highly critical to have data at your fingertips as and when you want it. Your company may be crippled with tons of data and it may prove a headache to control and convert the data into useful information. Data extraction services enable you get data quickly and in the right format.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Extraction-Services-For-Better-Outputs-in-Your-Business&id=2760257

Three Common Methods For Web Data Extraction

Three Common Methods For Web Data Extraction

Probably the most common technique used traditionally to extract data from web pages this is to cook up some regular expressions that match the pieces you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Our screen-scraper software actually started out as an application written in Perl for this very reason. In addition to regular expressions, you might also use some code written in something like Java or Active Server Pages to parse out larger chunks of text. Using raw regular expressions to pull out the data can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, and can get a bit messy when a script contains a lot of them. At the same time, if you're already familiar with regular expressions, and your scraping project is relatively small, they can be a great solution.

Other techniques for getting the data out can get very sophisticated as algorithms that make use of artificial intelligence and such are applied to the page. Some programs will actually analyze the semantic content of an HTML page, then intelligently pull out the pieces that are of interest. Still other approaches deal with developing "ontologies", or hierarchical vocabularies intended to represent the content domain.

There are a number of companies (including our own) that offer commercial applications specifically intended to do screen-scraping. The applications vary quite a bit, but for medium to large-sized projects they're often a good solution. Each one will have its own learning curve, so you should plan on taking time to learn the ins and outs of a new application. Especially if you plan on doing a fair amount of screen-scraping it's probably a good idea to at least shop around for a screen-scraping application, as it will likely save you time and money in the long run.

So what's the best approach to data extraction? It really depends on what your needs are, and what resources you have at your disposal. Here are some of the pros and cons of the various approaches, as well as suggestions on when you might use each one:

Raw regular expressions and code

Advantages:

- If you're already familiar with regular expressions and at least one programming language, this can be a quick solution.
- Regular expressions allow for a fair amount of "fuzziness" in the matching such that minor changes to the content won't break them.
- You likely don't need to learn any new languages or tools (again, assuming you're already familiar with regular expressions and a programming language).
- Regular expressions are supported in almost all modern programming languages. Heck, even VBScript has a regular expression engine. It's also nice because the various regular expression implementations don't vary too significantly in their syntax.

Ontologies and artificial intelligence

Advantages:

- You create it once and it can more or less extract the data from any page within the content domain you're targeting.
- The data model is generally built in. For example, if you're extracting data about cars from web sites the extraction engine already knows what the make, model, and price are, so it can easily map them to existing data structures (e.g., insert the data into the correct locations in your database).
- There is relatively little long-term maintenance required. As web sites change you likely will need to do very little to your extraction engine in order to account for the changes.

Screen-scraping software

Advantages:

- Abstracts most of the complicated stuff away. You can do some pretty sophisticated things in most screen-scraping applications without knowing anything about regular expressions, HTTP, or cookies.
- Dramatically reduces the amount of time required to set up a site to be scraped. Once you learn a particular screen-scraping application the amount of time it requires to scrape sites vs. other methods is significantly lowered.
- Support from a commercial company. If you run into trouble while using a commercial screen-scraping application, chances are there are support forums and help lines where you can get assistance.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Three-Common-Methods-For-Web-Data-Extraction&id=165416

Take Your Online Business to the Next Level with Web Scraping Services

Take Your Online Business to the Next Level with Web Scraping Services

So you've spent long hours developing your online business - going it alone and carving out your niche. You've invested a large part of yourself and your money into developing a good idea and now you're seeing some fruits of your labor. Many business websites today live and die on information and the ability to collect it effectively is what can make all the difference. Whether your business is old or just an idea, there is no wrong time to start gathering data. It will take your business to the next level.

Online startups need help right now

You've got a great idea. You think you can make money with it online. You're prepared to invest time and money to make it happen, but you're not sure if it will work? Web Scraping can help. A web scraping service can search for data relevant to your idea and deliver a concise report on how many other sites are doing the same thing, what they charge, how long they've been doing it, etc. This is an invaluable tool to help you determine what your next step will be and what direction to take.

Going it alone

You've already started your online business. You're on your way toward developing your web presence. How do you buildup your web traffic? Start data mining to find your direction. Many people at this stage choose to go it alone and start web parsing on their own to save on expenses. Unless your super tech savvy, don't waste your time. A professional web scraping service can be set up to extract website data and deliver information to you before you can even figure out how to use that software you just downloaded. That's time you can spend doing other things - like taking a break.

It's working - Now what?

Your site has been up and running for awhile and you are seeing results. You've established a good web presence and your traffic is growing. You're starting to see some returns and you want more. Now what? Start marketing! BUT WAIT! Before you spend more time and money targeting future customers, find out who they are and how to reach them. In this critical step, a web scraping service will make all the difference. It can search out forums and social media websites where consumers post reviews about products and services similar to yours. It can show what they like to use and what they are spending their money on and where they go to do it. It can show you where to target your advertising dollars to maximize your returns.

Good business gets better

You're web presence is established. Customers come back for your product or service frequently and your profits reflect this. You've put in the effort and you've earned your position in the market. You've reached a comfortable level with your online business. Now is the time to take the next step. In order to go from good to better, you need to start really developing information about your competition and how your potential customers are responding to them. What are your competitors doing right? More importantly, what are they doing wrong? You already have your customer base, but why not solidify it and grow it. Data mining at this stage will show you how to improve your products or services. It will show you if your competition is making a mistake and how you can take advantage of it. It will help you tinker with your pricing and customer service to maximize customer loyalty. It will take you to the next level.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Take-Your-Online-Business-to-the-Next-Level&id=6531030