Understanding URL scraping

Understanding URL scraping

URL scraping is the process where you automatically extract and filter URLs of WebPages that have specific features. The features that you are looking for vary depending on your goal. For example, if you are looking for a site where you can place your comment and get back link juice, you should go for WebPages that allow dofollow comments.

Techniques for URL scraping

There are many techniques that you can use to get the URL that you are looking for. Some of these techniques include:

Copy pasting: this is where you visit a given site and check whether it has the features that you are looking for. For example, if you are interested in dofollow links, you should visit a number of sites and find out if they have your target links. You should then identify the ones that have the features that you are looking for and compile a list.

Text grepping: this is a technique that allows you to search plain text on websites that match a regular expression. Although, the technique was designed for Unix, you can also use it on other operating systems.

HTTP programming: here you retrieve the WebPages that have the features that you are looking for. You should then note the URL of the pages. To retrieve the pages you have to post HTTP requests using a remote server that uses socket programming.

HTML Parser: a HTML parser allows you to mine data by detecting a common template, script or code on a specific website or Webpage. To be able to detect the script or code you have to use one of the many programming languages: HTQL, Java, PHP, XQuery and Python. Once the data is extracted, it's translated and packaged in a way that you are able to easily understand it.

DOM parsing: This is a technique where you retrieve dynamic content that has been generated by client side scripts that execute in a web browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or any other browsers.

URL scraping software: this is the easiest way of scraping URLs as all you need is high quality software that will do all the work for you. You should identify the features that you are interested in and then give command to the software. The software will go through all the sites on the internet and extract the URLs of the pages that have your target features.

We have plenty of information on CPV and Internet Marketing; therefore, if you are looking for URL Scraper tools for PPV you should highly consider visiting our website.

Source:http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/6180373?articleid=6180373

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

Data Mining - Techniques and Process of Data Mining

Data mining as the name suggest is extracting informative data from a huge source of information. It is like segregating a drop from the ocean. Here a drop is the most important information essential for your business, and the ocean is the huge database built up by you.

Recognized in Business

Businesses have become too creative, by coming up with new patterns and trends and of behavior through data mining techniques or automated statistical analysis. Once the desired information is found from the huge database it could be used for various applications. If you want to get involved into other functions of your business you should take help of professional data mining services available in the industry

Data Collection

Data collection is the first step required towards a constructive data-mining program. Almost all businesses require collecting data. It is the process of finding important data essential for your business, filtering and preparing it for a data mining outsourcing process. For those who are already have experience to track customer data in a database management system, have probably achieved their destination.

Algorithm selection

You may select one or more data mining algorithms to resolve your problem. You already have database. You may experiment using several techniques. Your selection of algorithm depends upon the problem that you are want to resolve, the data collected, as well as the tools you possess.

Regression Technique

The most well-know and the oldest statistical technique utilized for data mining is regression. Using a numerical dataset, it then further develops a mathematical formula applicable to the data. Here taking your new data use it into existing mathematical formula developed by you and you will get a prediction of future behavior. Now knowing the use is not enough. You will have to learn about its limitations associated with it. This technique works best with continuous quantitative data as age, speed or weight. While working on categorical data as gender, name or color, where order is not significant it better to use another suitable technique.

Classification Technique

There is another technique, called classification analysis technique which is suitable for both, categorical data as well as a mix of categorical and numeric data. Compared to regression technique, classification technique can process a broader range of data, and therefore is popular. Here one can easily interpret output. Here you will get a decision tree requiring a series of binary decisions.Our best wishes are with you for your endeavors.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining---Techniques-and-Process-of-Data-Mining&id=5302867

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-

Extensive Benefits of Data Mining Services to Marketing – Retail and Outreach Sectors…!!!

There is a vast ocean out there – An ocean of information on internet which is massive, brimming with a lot of data; in fact, it is

constantly getting updated, increase the volume with each passing day. In fact, it is believed that around 90% of total information

generated in the last two years, is now available on the internet.

Picking right set of information from this heap of data is like searching a needle in the haystack. It is almost next to impossible to

search it manually – You need a powerful magnet in form of data mining service provider…!!!

Data mining services work like a magnet – It helps you in finding the right kind of information from huge databases available in

the digital world. And with databases getting mammoth every minute, the importance of partnering with a professional and

reliable data mining company cannot be overlooked.Though, loaded with a lot of negative connotations; data mining still reigns

like a king! In fact, in order to truly appreciate the concept behind data mining, one needs to know it in its entirety.

Every coin has two sides – If there is a brighter side; there tends to be a dark side as well. Though, advantages of web extraction,

outweighs disadvantages the fact is it is always the dark underbelly that is highlighted and shown to the world. However, as wise

men say, focus on positive sides – Lets see what amazing advantages it can offer to your business and how well you can gain from

hiring a professional data mining services.


Upside or Advantage of Data Extraction Services:


While data mining is used primarily in business, it is interesting to know that benefits of data mining goes beyond and across

boundaries; it helps various industries as well.

Marketing/Retailing

Data mining can prove to be extremely helpful to the marketers and retailers who are looking out for potential clients as well as

aspires to maintain consumer satisfaction. This is one of the methods that allows the businesses to know their potential clients

better by acquiring their personal information and preferences.
Not just data extraction helps in determining the trends in goods and services by presenting an overview of online data. With

adequate information, you can improve your goods and services, along with changing or choosing the ones which are more in

demand. Consequently, success in business has been made quicker and easier these days because of data mining.

Streamline Outreach

Outreach forms an integral part of any business – And to effectively carry out outreach activities; one needs to have a huge cache

of database, that can help the marketers to learn how to approach a particular set of customers.
Information like that includes relevant e-mail addresses, mailing addresses or social media pages needs to be streamlined any

mailers to get the best results.
Data extraction makes this easier; since it gets all the updated information; and in process saves your time and money.
And as it is “the lotus flower grows in mud, but makes our world fragrant” – data mining services is marred by criticism and

controversy; however, its extensive advantages outweighs these negativity to a great extent.

Source: http://www.habiledata.com/blog/extensive-benefits-of-data-mining-services-to-marketing-retail-and-outreach-

sectors/