The benefits of gathering public web data are universal, but the challenges are exclusive. There are different pain points for SEO marketers, ecommerce site owners and cybersecurity experts. This is why dedicated web scraping tools that focus on specific needs of a particular industry are now increasingly gaining popularity.
Every industry has different needs when it comes to data. For example, a flight booking company finds it crucial to get data from a large number of websites from different locations so that it could provide accurate information to its customers. SEO professionals, meanwhile, require SERP data collecting to stay resilient to the challenge of constant search engine layout changes. Others struggle to collect data from highly complex targets.
The need for specialization
Nedas Višniauskas, Lead of Commercial Product Owners at Oxylabs, a leading data gathering solutions provider, says that as web scraping is becoming more mainstream, it's important to be able to address the very specific challenges of different data collection instances. With this in mind, he was recently leading the launch of Scraper APIs - a family of products that each focus on specific use cases.
"Web scraping as a technology is universal, but the targets from which companies want to collect data might be very distinct. To be effective at all of them, different approaches might be needed. Therefore, companies looking for web scraping solutions, now place more emphasis on tools that are dedicated to their particular needs", - Nedas says.
According to him, most companies now want to focus on what to do with the collected data rather than solve the challenges related to the process of gathering itself. Therefore many choose dedicated tools that promise hassle-free delivery of data and help adapt to the ever-changing landscape of the web.
"This was exactly our aim when we launched Scraper APIs. Each product is tailor-made for the needs of specific use cases. We took the most common obstacles associated with each scraping target and adapted our tools to overcome them."
Focus on data analysis rather than gathering
Scraper APIs include SERP Scraper API, Web Scraper API and Ecommerce Scraper API. While each is meant for different uses, they can also be used in a mix, if a certain company needs to scrape different targets.
Nedas gives an example of SEO analytics platforms that depend on the constant flow of fresh data. Those who use their own parsing or scraping tools are used to the constant breaking of them caused by common search engine algorithm, layout or feature changes. Therefore, they often see parser and scraper maintenance as one of their regular responsibilities. This, of course, costs a lot of time and money.
Tools like SERP Scraper API takes this hassle away, allowing the SEO platform to focus only on delivering their services to clients. SERP Scraper API is built to stay resilient to SERP layout changes, it has an integrated proxy rotator and auto-retry function. Additionally, it is also highly scalable - a common need for SEO platforms with numerous clients.
Adapting to complex targets
Meanwhile, ecommerce companies face a different challenge. Competitor research, price monitoring and other common data-driven strategies require collecting data from thousands of ecommerce websites. All these websites might have different layouts and present product data in variant structures. It might be a headache to constantly adapt to all these differentiations.
"Ecommerce Scraper API includes our AI-powered solution - Adaptive Parser. It can adapt to nearly any ecommerce product page, regardless of the structure of HTML code used. This allows ecommerce companies to save time while extracting essential data points and get timely as well as quality data instead of having to develop a different parser for every product page it wants to monitor", - explains Nedas.
Another industry where web scraping is the foundation of the business model is travel fare monitoring. To be able to provide their customers with reliable pricing information, they constantly need huge volumes of data from different sources. The challenge lies in the frequent fluctuations of travel and accommodation fares. Moreover, many accommodation businesses use geo-location based models: they show different prices depending on the visitor's location or even are inaccessible for some. This is where an advanced web scraping solution is needed.
"Web Scraper API is built to extract public data even from the most advanced and complex targets. It gets over CAPTCHA and IP blocks, and handles JavaScript heavy websites. Meanwhile its large proxy pool allows overcoming geo-restrictions and delivering accurate results for fare aggregators. Businesses do not need to deal with proxies themselves or with choosing the best type between datacenter or residential proxies - Web Scraper API does the job for them", - tells the Oxylabs representative.
More time on hands
The family of Scraper APIs is the reborn version of a previous Oxylabs product called Real Time Crawler. Real Time Crawler was one of the first web data gathering tools that focused on gathering ecommerce and search engine data on a large scale. Over the course of its existence, it has helped numerous companies to easily acquire public data.
Specialized web scraping tools make the public web data gathering process much less complicated. Companies can now dedicate more time for analysing the data rather than acquiring it.
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of techtimes.com
