Nov 12, 2020 Web scraping is the process of extracting information from the internet, now the intention behind this can be research, education, business, analysis, and others. Basic web scraping script consists of a “crawler” that goes to the internet, surf around the web, and scrape information from given pages. If you are looking for someone to build lists for you by scraping data it’s very cheap. From sites like fiverr or freelancer you can find lot’s of very competent “scrapers” who can put together lists of 1,000 for $5 or $10 US or list of tens of thousands for less than $100 in a day.
Web scraping is the solution for collecting the enormous amount of data over the web. Most businesses today need data and they need this data to be regularly collected or updated. But it’s impossible to manually collect data because the web is huge and more information is added on a daily basis. That’s where data scraping can help your business. Data scraping, web crawling or data extraction all refer to the collection of industry or topic related data on the web for many sectors including e-commerce, market research, human resources, finance, and real estate.
Machine learning has been transforming many industries for the last several decades. Think about self-driving cars or intelligent smartphones. Combined together, machine learning and data scraping are going to create a revolutionary innovation for the world of data. Data scraping has got quite popular during recent years with the increasing number of information. So if you want to extract data from a website, you need to either work with data scraping service or use a scraping tool. In the future, machine learning might make the data extraction process even easier and faster. However, today you will have to choose between the two options mentioned above. In this post, we’ll reveal the best data scraping companies of 2019 and describe their advantages.
Top 5 Web Scraping Companies
Our unique Chrome browser based scraping engine acts as a normal human being accessing the web. Our platform spans several cloud providers to achieve high scalability, geographical reach, reliability and cost efficiency. It is a huge step beyond what open source solutions like Selenium or Puppeteer can deliver. Zenscrape (zenscrape.com) Zenscrape is a hassle-free API that offers lightning-fast. Cost: Starts at $5.44 for 5 ports for a month Webshare is a datacenter proxy provider that offers its users free proxies. Aside from their free proxies, they have paid proxies that are faster, elite, and works quite well for web scraping.
DataHen offers full advanced web crawling, scraping and data extraction services to different industries and has great features which help gain a competitive advantage. At DataHen, we offer superior service and make sure that you can lean back and relax, while your data is being scraped by our team of professional scrappers. Here are the main features and advantages of DataHen:
- A Customized Approach – traditional data scraping techniques are limited in their capabilities and it can be hard to get customized data that corresponds to your needs. We solve such issues as we deal with difficult cases like authentication or additional coding issues, and even fill out forms.
- No Software – software scraping solutions can be not only quite pricey but also very complicated to understand and use. At DataHen, we provide you with the service, not software. This means that you just let us know what data you need and we deliver it to you.
- Captcha Problem Solved – CAPTCHA is a computer program that distinguishes humans from machines via challenge-response testing. Unlike most of the web scraping companies, we scrape and crawl websites that have CAPTCHA restriction.
Affordable Pricing – since our services are automated, the costs are thereby lower than usual. The budget won’t be a constraint if you need data because we charge for data extraction only.
Fast-Acting – our team is very responsive and makes sure to deliver a superior level service to the clients. If you have a question or concern regarding the work that is in progress, you will most surely get a fast response from the team.
DataHen extracts data for you and most importantly, it delivers the data in the format that suits your needs the most. So you get your raw data in the format you need, such as CSV format, Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, a PDF file or a JPEG. We can present your data in these formats or any other format that is preferred by you. The format in which you will get the data is very important for the further analysis of the information, so it’s important to get the data in a specific organized form. At DataHen, we scrape texts, images or any other files of your choice and needs. Also, we scrape different industries, including retail,pharmaceutical, automotive,finance, mortgage and many other industry-specific websites. We have scraped over a billion pages last year.
Scraper is a chrome extension that can extract data from websites and put into spreadsheets. It’s very simple to use when it comes to web page data extraction. However, although scraper is a simple data scraping tool, it is limited in terms of how much and what websites it can scrape. It will help you facilitate the online research process when you need to get data quickly and in a nicely formatted spreadsheet. Scraper is intended as an easy-to-use tool for users of different levels who feel comfortable with working with XPath.
Octoparse is another web scraping company that makes data mining process easy for all. You don’t need any special knowledge of coding to scrape pages with Octoparse. On their website, you can find a step-by-step guide that will teach you how to use Octoparse scraper. You will also find information on the modes to scrape, different ways to get data, and how to extract and download data on your device. Octoparse offers automated scraping with the following features:
- Cloud Service – the Cloud Service offers unlimited storage for the data you scrape. You can scrape and access data on Octoparse cloud platform for 24/7.
- Scheduled Scraping – since the process of scraping is automated, Octoparse offers you a solution to schedule crawling for a specific time. Tasks can be scheduled to scrape at any specific time, such as weekly, daily or even hourly.
IP Rotation – automatic IP rotation helps prevent IP blocking. Anonymous scraping minimizes the chances of getting traced and blocked.
- Downloads – you can download scraped data in different formats, such as CSV, Microsoft Excel, API or you can choose to save it to the cloud databases.
Datahut is a cloud-based web scraping platform that aims to make the data scraping process easy. You don’t need servers, coding or expensive software. Datahut wants to help businesses grow by dealing with the chaos of data on the web by offering a simple way to extract data from websites. The work process goes in the following steps:
- The company, first of all, gets to know the client to understand the needs and wants, in order to conduct a feasibility analysis and design a solution that works best for the client.
- Based on the complexity of the source website and extraction volume, you decide on the pricing and the company sends you a payable invoice.
- The company then creates an account for you in the customer support portal for further communication with data mining engineers and customer support managers.
- After the approval of the sample data for you, a full data crawl is conducted and sent to the quality assurance tool to make sure that there are no faulty data.
- The data is then delivered to you in your preferred source like Amazon S3, Dropbox, Box, FTP upload or via a custom API.
- Customers get free maintenance of the data scrapers as part of the subscription. So if the client needs data on a recurring basis, they can schedule it on the platform and data will be gathered and shared automatically.
PromptCloud is doing web data extraction using cloud computing technologies that focus on helping enterprises acquire large scale structured data from all over the web.
Currently, the main industries that they scrape include travel, finance, health-care, marketing, analytics and more. The main features of PromtCloud include:
- Customer Data Extraction – data extraction solution that delivers web data exactly the way a customer wants and needs, and at the desired frequency via the most preferred delivery channel.
- Hosted Indexing – aims at indexing crawled data to focus only on the relevant datasets by using a logical combination in queries.
- Live Crawls – crawling that’s done in real-time to deliver fresh data via search API.
- DataStock – allows you to download clean and ready-to-use pre-crawled data sets available for a wide range of industries.
- JobsPikr – a job data extraction that uses machine learning techniques to intelligently crawl job data from the web.
Data Scraping Services vs Tools
We’ve looked through the best data scraping companies of 2019, but how to choose the one that suits your needs the best? Well, firstly, you need to choose between a web scraping tool and a web scraping service. They have their advantages and disadvantages, so we’ll consider both.
Web Scraping Tools
Web scraping tools should be your top choice if you need data to support a small scale project. Also, they are great especially if you are on a tight budget. However, they are less scalable and viable. So if you need to conduct comprehensive monitoring of a larger amount of information for your enterprise, then the power of tools can be quite limited. Yet, there are many different scraping tools out there with functionality and pricing varying vastly. Most of them offer free trial periods. You can try the free demo to check if the tool fits your needs before subscribing to the paid version.
The main problem with this method is that the extracted data might not be ready to be used for your business needs immediately. Most of the scraping tools operate on objective-focused algorithms by crawling raw data from a given website without refining the information for immediate usage. So be ready to spend extra time to manage the lists of scraped data and arrange the massive amount of information.
Web Scraping Services
Web scraping service providers, also known as DaaS (data as a service) companies provide you with clean, accurate and structured data once you purchase the service.
Web crawling services use advanced scraping techniques to eliminate the risk of missing out the data from complex-coded web pages such as websites coded with Ajax, JavaScript or other complex programming languages. They also provide full coverage of Internet sources, while using a tool, you’ll need to pay for a tool upgrade to access new sources or features. DaaS companies should be your best choice for large-scale operations, such as financial analysis, brand and media monitoring, lead generation and more.
The Advantages of Outsourcing Data Scraping
Businesses are always in a hunt for big chunks of raw data. Getting valuable data via web scraping is a long and time-consuming process. The long and tiring data crawling and hunt for information ends once a company outsources data scraping to a service. Working with a reputable and professional data mining company is the solution for your data needs. Such companies will provide you with accurate and clean data from all over the web. They are not limited in terms of the number of web pages they scrape all over the internet and are able to extract information from websites with Captcha restrictions.
If you need to extract a large amount of data for a big project, web scraping services offer significant advantages over web scraping tools in terms of cost-efficiency, scalability, and a relatively short time-frame. Tools are less expensive, but they are limited in terms of what and how much they can scrape. While some advanced tools provide custom extraction and parsing, these features usually imply a higher pricing model. And this affects the overall cost-effectiveness of scraping tools. So if you’re undertaking a large project, you should consider working with a web scraping service for the overall effectiveness of the data you’ll get in the end.
Having your data provided by a professional service saves you precious time so that you can focus on your daily tasks and business growth. Outsourcing will enable your company to focus on the core business operations, thus improve the overall productivity. It helps businesses in managing data effectively, thereby helping achieve and generate more profits. So make a wise decision for your business’s future growth and choose a professional web scraping service, which will handle all the data work for you!
How businesses use data through web scraping
Web scraping enables businesses to take unstructured data on the world wide web and turn itinto structured data so that it can be consumed by their applications, providing significant businessvalue
Stock Market and Financial Data
Gather data about global financial markets, stock markets, trading, commodity and economicindicators. Enhance and augmentthe data available to analysts and internal financial models to make them perform better.
Product, Pricing and Review Data
Scrape eCommerce websites to extract product prices, availability, reviews, prominence, brandreputation and more. Monitor your distribution chain, and analyze customer reviews to improveyourproducts and profits with this data.
Real Estate and Housing Data
Scrape Real Estate listings, Agents, Brokers, Houses, Apartments, Mortgages, Foreclosures, MLS.Keep a watch on new databy setting up custom email alerts.
Job Data and Human Capital
Find the best candidates for your company or keep tabs on who your competition is hiring.Aggregate jobs from job boards or company websites - all this can be accomplished through webscraping.
Travel, Hotel and Airline Data
Extract data from travel websites to accurately analyze hotel reviews, pricing, roomavailability andairline ticket prices using our advanced web scraping services. Stay competitive through the useof data.
Dark and Deep Web Data
The Dark web and the Deep web is a gold mine ready to be exploited. Data around cybersecurity,threats and crime related trends can be gathered for value-added analysis.
Sales Leads
Get new sales leads relevant to your business using targeted scraping techniques. Enrich datawith emails, phone numbers and social media profiles for sales or marketing campaigns.
Data for Research and Journalism
Power your next research project or news story with data from the web - Environmental Data,Third World Development Data, Crime Data, Local and Global trends etc.
Social Media Data
Gather data from social media - Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Collect historical data or getalerts from these sites.Monitor your reach and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
These are just some examples of the countless uses of web data gathered through webscraping services.
We are happy to engage in a detailed discussion with you about exciting and innovative applications ofour web data extraction services to power your business.
Web Scraping Costumes