Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3860679

Data Collection, Just Another Way To Gather Information

Data collection just does not help the companies to launch new products or know about the public reaction to a specific issue, it is a very useful tool for statistical inferences, once the collected data is compiled. The process of data collection is the third step of the six step market research processes. Data collection can be done in two ways involving various technicalities. In this article, we shall give a brief overview of the same.

Data collection can be done in two ways - secondary data and primary data. Secondary data collection involves is the information available in books, journals, previous researches or studies and the Internet. It basically involves making use of the data already present to build or substantiate a concept.

On the other hand, primary data collection is the process of data collection through questionnaire by directly asking respondents of their opinions. Forming the right questionnaire is the most important aspect of data collection. The researcher conducting the data collection just has to be aware of the process. He should have a clear idea about the information sought by the concerned party.

Besides, the data collection officer should be able to construct the questionnaire in such a way so as to elicit the responses needed. Having constructed the questionnaire the researcher should identify the target sample. To illustrate the point clearly, we shall look into the following example.

Suppose, data collection is aimed from an area A, then, if all the residents of the data are given the questionnaire, it is called a census or in other words data collection is done from all the individuals of the specified area. One of the most common examples of data collection done by the government is census. For example the population census conducted by the US Census Bureau every ten years. On the other hand, if only twenty or thirty percent of the population living in area A are given the questionnaire, the mode of data collection would be called sampling.

The data collected from the target sample with a well-defined questionnaire will project the response of the entire population living in the area. Data collected from a sample helps to control the cost and time spent on collecting data from the population. Sample is a part of population.

Data collection just gets easier from the target sample with the help of a pretested questionnaire, which is later analyzed using statistical tests like ANOVA, Chi Square test and so on. These tests help the researcher to infer the result obtained from the data collection.

Market research/data collection is a fast growing and lucrative career option now days. One has to undertake a course in marketing, statistics and research before starting out. It is indeed very important to have a through understanding of various concepts and the theories related. Some basic terminologies related to data collection are: census, incidence, sample, population, parameters, sampling frames and so on.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Collection,-Just-Another-Way-To-Gather-Information&id=853158

How Easily Can You Extract Data From Web

How Easily Can You Extract Data From Web

With tech advancements taking the entire world by a storm, every sector is undergoing massive transformations. As far as the business arena is concerned, the rise of big data and data analytic is playing a crucial part in operations. Big data and data analysis is the best way to identify customer interests. Businesses can gain crystal clear insights into consumers’ preferences, choices, and purchase behaviours, and that’s what leads to unmatched business success. So, it’s here that we come across a crucial question. How do enterprises and organizations leverage data to gain crucial insights into consumer preferences? Well, data extraction and mining are the two significant processes in this context. Let’s take a look at what data extraction means as a process.

Decoding data extraction

Businesses across the globe are trying their best to retrieve crucial data. But, what is it that’s helping them do that? It’s here that the concept of data extraction comes into the picture. Let’s begin with a functional definition of this concept. According to formal definitions, ‘data extraction’ refers to the retrieval of crucial information through crawling and indexing. The sources of this extraction are mostly poorly-structured or unstructured data sets. Data extraction can prove to be highly beneficial if done in the right way. With the increasing shift towards online operations, extracting data from the web has become highly important.

The emergence of ‘scraping’

The act of information or data retrieval gets a unique name, and that’s what we call ‘data scraping.’ You might have already decided to pull data from 3rd party websites. If that’s what it is, then it’s high time to embark on the project. Most of the extractors will begin by checking the presence of APIs. However, they might be unaware of a crucial and unique option in this context.

Automatic data support

Every website lends virtual support to a structured data source, and that too by default. You can pull out or retrieve highly relevant data directly from the HTML. The process is termed as ‘web scraping’ and can ensure numerous benefits for you. Let’s check out how web scraping is useful and awesome.

Any content you view is ready for scraping

All of us download various stuff throughout the day. Whether it is music, important documents or images, downloads seem to be regular affairs. When you are successful in downloading any particular content of a page, it means the website offers unrestricted access to your browser. It won’t take long for you to understand that the content is programmatically accessible too. On that note, it’s high time to work out effective reasons that define the importance of web scraping. Before opting for RSS feeds, APIs, or other conventional data extraction methods, you should assess the benefits of web scraping. Here’s what you need to know in this context.

Website vs. APIs: Who’s the winner?

Site owners are more concerned about their public-facing or official websites than the structured data feeds. APIs can change, and feeds can shift without prior notifications. The breakdown of Twitter’s developer ecosystem is a crucial example for this.

So, what are the reasons for this downfall?

At times, these errors are deliberate. However, the crucial reasons are something else. Most of the enterprises are completely unaware of their structured data and information. Even if the data gets damaged, altered, or mangled, there’s no one to care about it.

However, that isn’t what happens with the website. When an official website stops functioning or delivers poor performance, the consequences are direct and in-your-face. Quite naturally, developers and site owners decide to fix it almost instantaneously.

Zero-rate limiting

Rate-limiting doesn’t exist for public websites. Although it’s imperative to build defences against access automation, most of the enterprises don’t care to do that. It’s only done if there are captchas on signups. If you aren’t making repeated requests, there are no possibilities of you being considered as a DDOS attack.

In-your-face data

Web scraping is perhaps the best way to gain access to crucial data. The desired data sets are already there, and you won’t have to rely on APIs or other data sources for gaining access. All you need to do is browse the site and find out the most appropriate data. Identifying and figuring out the basic data patterns will help you to a great extent.

Unknown and Anonymous access

You might want to gather information or collect data secretly. Simply put, you might wish to keep the entire process highly confidential. APIs will demand registrations and give you a key, which is the most important part of sending requests. With HTTP requests, you can stay secure and keep the process confidential, as the only aspects exposed are your site cookies and IP address. These are some of the reasons explaining the benefits of web scraping. Once you are through with these points, it’s high time to master the art of scraping.

Getting started with data extraction

If you are already eager to grab data, it’s high time you work on the blueprints for the project. Surprised? Well, data scraping or rather web data scraping requires in-depth analysis along with a bit of upfront work. While documentations are available with APIs, that’s not the case with HTTP requests. Be patient and innovative, as that will help you throughout the project.

2. Data fetching

Begin the process by looking for the URL and knowing the endpoints. Here are some of the pointers worth considering:

- Organized information: You must have an idea of the kind of information you want. If you wish to have it in an organized manner, rely on the navigation offered by the site. Track the changes in the site URL while you click through sections and sub-sections.
- Search functionality: Websites with search functionality will make your job easier than ever. You can keep on typing some of the useful terms or keywords based on your search. While doing so, keep track of URL changes.
- Removing unnecessary parameters: When it comes to looking for crucial information, the GET parameter plays a vital role. Try looking for unnecessary and undesired GET parameters in the URL, and removing them from the URL. Keep the ones that’ll help you load the data.

2. Pagination comes next

While looking for data, you might have to scroll down and move to subsequent pages. Once you click to Page 2, ‘offset=parameter’ gets added to the selected URL. Now, what is this function all about? The ‘offset=parameter’ function can represent either the number of features on the page or the page-numbering itself. The function will help you perform multiple iterations until you attain the “end of data” status.

Trying out AJAX

Most of the people nurture certain misconceptions about data scraping. While they think that AJAX makes their job tougher than ever, it’s actually the opposite. Sites utilising AJAX for data-loading ensures smooth data scraping. The time isn’t far away when AJAX will return along with JavaScript. Pulling up the ‘Network’ tab in Firebug or Web Inspector will be the best thing to do in this context. With these tips in mind, you will have the opportunity to get crucial data or information from the server. You need to extract the information and get it out of the page markup, which is the most difficult or tricky part of the process.

Unstructured data issues

When it comes to dealing with unstructured data, you will need to keep certain crucial aspects in mind. As stated earlier, pulling out the data from page markups is a highly critical task. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Utilising the CSS hooks

According to numerous web designers, the CSS hooks happen to be the best resources for puling data. Since it doesn’t involve numerous classes, CSS hooks offer straightforward data scraping.

2. Good HTML Parsing

Having a good HTML library will help you in ways more than one. With the help of a functional and dynamic HTML parsing library, you can create several iterations as and when you wish to.
Knowing the loopholes

Web scraping won’t be an easy affair. However, it won’t be a hard nut to crack either. While knowing the crucial web scraping tips is necessary, it’s also imperative to get an idea of the traps. If you have been thinking about it, we have something for you!

- Login contents: Contents that require you to login might prove to be potential traps. It reveals your identity and wreaks havoc on your project’s confidentiality.

- Rate limiting: Rate limiting can affect your scraping needs both positively and negatively, and that entirely depends on the application you are working on.

Source:-https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-easy-is-data-extraction

How Hedge Funds Can Use Web Scraping

How Hedge Funds Can Use Web Scraping

Web scraping or data extraction is the need of the hour to make sense of the huge and varied data being generated across multiple sources on the web. Irrespective of the sector you are working in, data extraction and mining is a crucial necessity to glean insights into consumer behavior, market forces, competitive intelligence, and price movements, and assist in management decision making.

There’s no denying the fact that numerous brands and enterprises are leveraging data extraction for further development and growth. Of late, hedge fund owners too are showing a huge affinity to utilizing the prowess of web scraping for unlocking new investment opportunities.

What we need to know is how web scraping is helping out hedge fund owners. What is it that makes web scraping essential for them and how can they use the technology to their advantage?
Fund management with web scraping

For a majority of discretionary fund managers, web scraping is a relatively new term. Although data scientists are aware of the concept, they might not have the right skills that lead to effective use of web scraping and data extraction. So, how does hedge fund management take place now? Let’s take a look at the current processes.

Most of the hedge funds have dedicated and centralized teams looking after the data extraction process. They have a group which is continuously looking for crucial data thus extracting it for more information. Once they find what they are looking for, they seek assistance from skilled data scientists who prepare comprehensive reports on the key findings. Based on these reports, managers have to take significant steps and implement crucial business strategies.

It’s here that the major problem arises. Most of these managers aren’t aware of the technicalities involved in data extraction. They don’t know what to do with these reports when it comes to devising business strategies.
The need for effective techniques

What you need is a comprehensive and integrated approach towards the entire process. Data scientists and business managers should have crystal clear understanding of web scraping thus working in tandem for better results. Here’s how they can work together:

1. Portfolio managers: PMs will need to develop a comprehensive understanding of trading strategies along with the power to explain his understandings. He should have the power to identify alpha opportunities.

2. Data scientists: Data scientists should know the art of data mining thus ingesting the findings into a database.

Simultaneous operations should take place where PMs, data scientists, and web scraping experts will take active parts. In a nutshell, business owners need highly efficient quant teams capable of extracting quant data sets.
The steps around web scraping for hedge funds

If you are managing hedge funds, data extraction and web scraping will be essential for you. Before knowing how to use this particular technique, make sure you gain information about the crucial steps that lead to web scraping.

•   Gaining access to data sets: Without the right data sets, it is impossible to perform web scraping. Data scientists and PMs must put their best efforts to find the correct information. It can come from internal divisions, external publications, or even from social media.

•   Understanding the financial drivers: You should know about the financial drivers involved in the process. Web scraping will depend on these key drivers to a great extent.

•   Quant vs. fundamental: There’s always a debate between data quants and fundamental knowledge. The prime emphasis should always be on identifying the insights, working on them, and turning them into effective actions.

With these steps in mind, you can plan the fund management process in detail thus taking the venture towards unsurpassed growth. Hedge fund owners have been relying on fundamental knowledge since a long time; it is high time they made a move and embraced web scraping.

Current positions and prospects

If market reports are anything to go by, you will come across nearly 70 hedge funds who claim to leverage big data. Once you take a closer look, the entire situation will get revealed. Only 20 amongst these 70 hedge funds work with Big Data and rely on web scraping techniques. Market reports also suggest that only a few of them are good at performing the process.

Web scraping is going to be the future! Just after a few years, hedge fund owners will have to rely on web scraping for effective fund management. Therefore, it’s high time to upgrade performances, processes, and operations. Those getting introduced to the concept for the first time should learn the art of performing web scraping and data extraction.

Building strong and effective financial models

Do you feel the existing infrastructure is enough to leverage web scraping? That’s not true, as there are numerous other aspects involved in the process. The presence of a strong and reliable financial model is of paramount significance. Financial models play a highly significant part in the utilization of technologies. If you are thinking of implementing web scraping, check the financial infrastructure and support your venture offers to you.

The third wave

Before the emergence of web scraping and data extraction, hedge fund owners relied on traditional data mining techniques. Those weren’t effective to a great extent, as they failed to offer targeted insights into the extraction process.

It’s here that the need for a third wave came up, and web scraping was what we all waited for. With this new and innovative technology, hedge fund managers will be able to utilize insights to stay ahead of the growth curve!

Final thoughts

Hedge fund management involves quite a few significant processes in order to yield the benefits expected by senior management of the company. However, if you are planning to use web scraping, it is important to know the right tips to do so. Most of the data scientists want to bridge the gap between fundamental fund management and web scraping. It is quite obvious that the latter is beneficial in the long run. With these tips and web scraping techniques in mind, you can ensure targeted hedge fund management and handling.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-hedge-funds-can-use-web-scraping

Web Scraping using Chrome Scraper Extension

Do you want to get data from a web page or website to CSV or Excel Spreadsheet? The answer is web scraping. There are number of web scraping software and services available in the market like Visual Web Ripper, Mozenda, Kimono Labs, Outwit Hub, ScraperWiki and Automation Anywhere etc. for web data extraction. These all tools and services are paid and not easy to use for non-technical persons. Now I am going to discuss another method of doing web scraping that is easy to use and free.  There are various Google Chrome browser extensions available at Google Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps) using that we can do screen scraping/web scraping.

1. Web scraper
Official Website: http://www.webscraper.io

Install it by visiting following link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd

Web Scraper is a chrome extension for scraping data out of web pages to Excel Spreadsheet or database. It allows you to create a plan/sitemap. According to that plan/sitemap a website is traversed and the data is extracted. The extracted data can be exported to CSV or stored in CouchDB. It also supports scraping from multiple pages with pagination. You can use Web Scraper for scraping multiple types of data like text, tables, images, links and more. It also supports web data extraction from dynamic web pages built up with modern web technologies like JavaScript and AJAX.

2. Data Miner
Install DataMiner by visiting following link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dataminer/nndknepjnldbdbepjfgmncbggmopgden

DataMiner is a standalone chrome browser plugin for extracting data from the websites. Later on extracted data can be exported to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets.

Using DataMiner extension, you can scrape data from tables and lists on the websites and easily export them into CSV file or Microsoft Excel. It also supports XPath selectors. You can use it for scraping emails, Google search results, HTML tables etc.



3. Screen Scraper:
Install it by visiting following link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/screenscraper/pfegffhjcgkneoemnlniggnhkfioidjg

Screen Scraper is another chrome scraper as it name suggest is a Chrome browser extension/plugin for screen scraping. Screen scraping is the process of automatically scraping/extracting information from websites. Later on, Scraped information can be downloaded as a CSV file or JSON file. It supports Element Selectors and Xpath Selectors method.

4. iMacro
Official Website of iMacro: http://imacros.net/

Install iMacro it by visiting following link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imacros-for-chrome/cplklnmnlbnpmjogncfgfijoopmnlemp?hl=en

iMacro is a macro recorder for your Google Chrome browser. Macro recorder is a piece of tool that records user actions. It allows users to record repetitious tasks on the web and replay it at later time. It is useful tool for web automation, data extraction and web testing. Using iMacros you can remember passwords, fill out web forms, download files and possibilities are endless. iMacros is useful to Web developers for web regression testing, performance testing and web transaction monitoring. To use iMacros you just need to record the task once and save it in your machine next time when you need to perform the same task you need not repeat the same task again and again. iMacro plugin comes for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer too.

Source url :-http://webdata-scraping.com/web-scraping-using-chrome-scraper-extension/

Six Tools to Make Data Scraping More Approachable

What is data scraping?

Data scraping is a technique in which a computer program/software extracts data from a website, so it can be used for other purposes.Scraping may sound a little intimidating, but with the help of scraping tools, the process can be a lot more approachable. The tools are used to capture data you need from specific web pages quicker and easier.

Let your computer do all the work

It takes only a few minutes for systems to recognize each others codes even in huge databases. Computers have their own language and that is why some of these tools make it easier to pull and format information in a way that is simpler for people to reuse.

Here is a list of some data scraping tools:

1.Diffbot

What makes this tool so likable is the business-friendly approach. Tools like Diffbot are perfect for searching through competitors work and the performance of your own webpage. Get product data from images, articles, discussions, web crawling tools and process websites. If you like how this sounds, see for yourself and sign up for their 14-day free trial.


2.Import.io

Import.io can help you easily get the information from the any source on the web. This tool can get your data in less than 30 seconds, depending on how complicated the data is and its structure in the website.  It can also be used for multiple URL scraping at once.

Here is one example: Which city of California based organizations try to hire the most through Linkedin? Check this list of jobs available in linkedin, download a csv file, sort from A to Z the cities and voila – San Francisco it is. Did you know that it’s for free?

3.Kimono

Kimono gives you easy access to APIs created for various web pages. No need to write any code or install any software to extract data. Simply paste the URL into the website or use a bookmark. Select how often you want the data to be collected and it saves it for you.

4.ScraperWiki

ScraperWiki gives you two choices – extract data from PDFs or build your own scraping tool in PHP, Ruby and Python language. It is meant for more experienced users and offers consulting (a paid service) if you need to learn some coding to get what you need. The first two PDF files are analyzed and reorganized for free, afterwards it’s a paid solution.

5.Grabz.it

Yes, Grabz.it does grab something. It takes information that is meaningful to you. The tool extracts data from the web, then converts videos into animated GIF that you can use on your website or application. This tool was made for those who code in ASP.NET, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby languages.

6.Python

If programming is the language you love the most, then use Python to build your own scraping tool and get the data from a page you want to explore. It is particularly useful if the other tools don’t recognize the data you need.

If you haven’t used this tool before, follow this playlist of videos to learn how to use Python for web scraping:

If you want more tools, look into the Common Crawl organization. It is made for those who are interested in the data crawling world. Need a more specific tool? DMOZ and KDnuggets have lists of other tools for web data mining.

All of these tools extract information in spreadsheet formats and that is why this webinar about how to work with data in Excel can help you understand more about what to do if you desire  to supply the world with unique and beautifully data visualizations.



Source Url:-https://infogr.am/blog/six-tools-to-make-data-scraping-more-approachable/

Things to Consider when Evaluating Options for Web Data Extraction

Things to Consider when Evaluating Options for Web Data Extraction

Web data extraction possess tremendous applications in the business world. There are businesses that function solely based on data, others use it for business intelligence, competitor analysis and market research among other countless use cases. While everything is good with data, extracting massive data from the web is still a major roadblock for many companies, more so because they are not going through the optimal route. We decided to give you a detailed overview of different ways by which you can extract data from the web. This could help you make the final call while evaluating different options for web data extraction.

Different routes you can take to web data

Although different solutions exist for web data extraction, you should opt for the one that’s most suited for your requirement. These are the various options you can go with:

1. Build it in-house

2. DIY web scraping tool

3. Vertical-specific solution

4. Data-as-a-Service

1.   Build it in-house

If your company is technically rich, meaning you have a good technical team that can build and maintain a web scraping setup, it makes sense to build a crawler setup in-house. This option is more suitable for medium sized businesses with simpler requirements when it comes to data. However, building an in-house setup is not the biggest challenge- maintaining it is. Since web crawlers are really fragile and are vulnerable to the changes on target websites, you will have to dedicate time and labour into the maintenance of the in-house crawling setup.

Building your own in-house setup will not be easy if the number of websites you need to scrape are high or the websites aren’t using simple and traditional coding practices. If the target websites use complicated dynamic code, building your in-house setup becomes a bigger hurdle. This can hog your resources especially if extracting data from the web is not a competency of your business. Scaling up with your in-house crawling setup could also be a challenge as this would require high end resources, an extensive tech stack and a dedicated internal team. If your data needs are limited and the target websites simple, you can go ahead with an in-house crawling setup to cover your data needs.

Pros:

- Total ownership and control over the process
- Ideal for simpler requirements

2.   DIY scraping tools

If you don’t want to maintain a technical team that can build an in-house crawling setup and infrastructure, don’t worry. DIY scraping tools are exactly what you need. These tools usually require no technical knowledge as such and can be used by anyone who is good with the basics. They usually come with a visual interface where you can configure and deploy your web crawlers. The downside however, is that they are very limited in their capabilities and scale of operation. They are an ideal choice if you are just starting out with no budgets for data acquisition. DIY web scraping tools are usually priced very low and some are even free to use.

Maintenance would still be a challenge that you have to face with the DIY tools. As web crawlers are susceptible to becoming useless with minor changes in the target sites, you still have to maintain and adapt the tool from time to time. The good part is that it doesn’t require technically sound labour to handle them. Since the solution is readymade, you will also save the costs associated with building your own infrastructure for scraping.

With DIY tools, you will also be sacrificing on the data quality as these tools are not known for providing data in a ready to consume format. You will either have to employ an automated tool to check the data quality or do it manually. With these downsides apart, DIY tools can cater to simple and small scale data requirements. 

Pros:

- Full control over the process
- Prebuilt solution
- You can avail support for the tools
- Easier to configure and use

3.   Vertical-specific solution

You might be able find a data provider catering to only a specific industry vertical. If you could find one that has data for the industry that you are targeting, consider yourself lucky. Vertical specific data providers can give you data that is comprehensive in nature which improves the overall quality of the project. These solutions typically give you datasets that are already extracted and is ready to use.

The downside is the lack of customisation options. Since the provider is focusing on a specific industry vertical, their solution is less flexible to be altered depending on your specific requirements. They won’t let you add or remove data points and the data is given as is. It will be hard to find a vertical-specific solution that has data exactly the way you want. Another important thing to consider is that your competitors have access to the same data from these vertical-specific data providers. The data you get is hence less exclusive, but this may or may not be a deal breaker depending upon your requirement.

Pros:

- Comprehensive data from the industry
- Faster access to data
- No need to handle the complicated aspects of extraction

4.   Data as a service (DaaS)

Getting the required data from a DaaS provider is by far the best way to extract data from the web. With a data provider, you are completely relieved from the responsibility of crawler setup, maintenance and quality inspection of the data being extracted. Since these are companies specialised in data extraction with a pre-built infrastructure and dedicated team to handle it, they can provide this service to you at a much lower cost than what you’d incur with an in-house crawling setup.

In the case of a DaaS solution, all you have to do is provide them with your requirements like the data points, source websites, frequency of crawl, data format and the delivery methods. DaaS providers have high end infrastructure, resources and expert team to extract data from the web efficiently.

They will also have far superior knowledge in extracting data efficiently and at scale. With DaaS, you also have the comfort of getting data that’s free from noise and is formatted properly for compatibility. Since the data goes through quality inspections at their end, you can focus only on  applying data to your business. This can greatly reduce the workload on your data team and improve the efficiency.

Customisation and flexibility are other great advantages that come with a DaaS solution. Since these solutions are meant for the large enterprises, their offering is completely customisable for your exact requirements. If your requirement is large scale and recurring, it’s always best to go with a DaaS solution.

Pros:

- Completely customisable for your requirement
- Takes complete ownership of the process
- Quality checks to ensure high quality data
- Can handle dynamic and complicated websites
- More time to focus on your core business

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/choosing-a-data-extraction-service-provider

3 Advantages of Web Scraping for Your Enterprise

In today’s Internet-dominated world possessing the relevant information for your business is the key to success and prosperity. Harvested in a structural and organized manner, the information will help facilitate business processes in many ways, including, but not limited to, market research, competition analysis, network building, brand promotion and reputation tracking. More targeted information means a more successful business and with the widespread competition in place, the strive for better performances is crucial.

The results of data harvesting prove to be an invaluable assistance in the age when you have the need to be informed and if you want to stand your chance in the highly competitive modern markets. This is the reason why web data harvesting has long become an inevitable component of a successful enterprise and it is a highly useful tool in both kick-starting and maintaining a functioning business by providing relevant and accurate data when needed.

However good your product or service is, the simple truth is that no-one will buy it if they don't want it or believe that they don't need it. Moreover, you won't persuade anyone that they want or need to buy what you're offering unless you clearly understand what it is that your customers really want. This way, it is crucial to have an understanding of your customers’ preferences. Always remember - they are the kings of the market and they determine the demand. Having this in mind, you can use web data scraping to get the vital information and be able to make the crucial, game-changing decisions to make your enterprise the next big thing.

Enough about how awesome web scraping is in theory! Now, let’s zoom in on 3 specific and tangible advantages that it can provide for your business, helping You benefit from them.

1. Provision of huge amounts of data

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that there is an overflowing demand for new data for businesses across the globe. This happens because the competition increases day by day. Thus, the more information you have about your products, competitors, market etc. the better are your chances of expanding and persisting in the competitive business environment. This is a challenge but your enterprise is in luck because web scraping is specifically designed to collect the data which can be later used to analyse the market and make the necessary adjustments. But if you think that collecting data is as simple as it sounds and there is no sophistication involved in the process, think again: simply collecting data is not enough. The manner in which data extraction processes flow is also very important; as mere data collection itself is useless. The data needs to be organized and provided in a useable format to be accessible to wide masses. Good data management is key to efficiency. It’s instrumental to choose the right format, because its functions and capacities will determine the speed and productivity of your efforts, especially when you deal with large chunks of data. This is where excellent data scraping tools and services come in handy. They are widely available nowadays and are able to satisfy your company’s needs in a professional and timely manner.

2.  Market research and demand analyses

Trends and innovations allow you to see the general picture of your industry: how it’s faring today, what’s been trendy recently and which ones faded quickly. This way, you can avoid repeating mistakes of unsuccessful businesses, as well as, foresee how well yours will do, and possibly predict new trends.

Data extraction by web crawling will also provide you with up-to-date information about similar products or services in the market. Catalogues, web stores, results of promotional campaigns – all that data can be harvested. You need to know your competitors, if you want to be able to challenge their positions on the market and win over customers from them.

Furthermore, knowledge about various major and minor issues of your industry will help you in assessing the future demand of your product or service. More importantly, with the help of web scraping your company will remain alert for changes, adjustments and analyses of all aspects of your product or service.

3.  Business evaluation for intelligence

We cannot stress enough the importance of regularly analysing and evaluating your business. It is absolutely crucial for every business to have up-to-date information on how well they are doing and where they are amongst others in the market. For instance, if a competitor decides to lower the prices in order to grow their customer base you need to be prepared whether you can remain in the industry despite lowering prices. This can only be done with the help of data scraping services and tools.

Moreover, extracted data on reviews and recommendations from specific websites or social media portals will introduce you to the general opinion of the public. You can also use this technique to identify potential new customers and sway their opinions in your favor by creating targeted ads and campaigns.

To sum it up, it is undeniable that web scraping is a proven practice when it comes to maintaining a strong and competitive enterprise. Combining relevant information on your industry, competitors, partners and customers with thought-out business strategies and promotional campaigns, as well as, market research and business analyses will prove to be a solid way of establishing yourself in the market. Whether you own a startup or a successful company, keeping a finger on the pulse of the ever-evolving market will never hurt you. In fact, it might very well be the single most important advantage that will differentiate you from your competitors.

Source Url :- https://www.datahen.com/blog/3-advantages-of-web-scraping-for-your-enterprise

How Easily Can You Extract Data From Web

With tech advancements taking the entire world by a storm, every sector is undergoing massive transformations. As far as the business arena is concerned, the rise of big data and data analytics is playing a crucial part in operations. Big data and data analysis is the best way to identify customer interests. Businesses can gain crystal clear insights into consumers’ preferences, choices, and purchase behaviours, and that’s what leads to unmatched business success. So, it’s here that we come across a crucial question. How do enterprises and organisations leverage data to gain crucial insights into consumer preferences? Well, data extraction and mining are the two significant processes in this context. Let’s take a look at what data extraction means as a process.

Decoding data extraction
Businesses across the globe are trying their best to retrieve crucial data. But, what is it that’s helping them do that? It’s here that the concept of data extraction comes into the picture. Let’s begin with a functional definition of this concept. According to formal definitions, ‘data extraction’ refers to the retrieval of crucial information through crawling and indexing. The sources of this extraction are mostly poorly-structured or unstructured data sets. Data extraction can prove to be highly beneficial if done in the right way. With the increasing shift towards online operations, extracting data from the web has become highly important.

The emergence of ‘scraping’
The act of information or data retrieval gets a unique name, and that’s what we call ‘data scraping.’ You might have already decided to pull data from 3rd party websites. If that’s what it is, then it’s high time to embark on the project. Most of the extractors will begin by checking the presence of APIs. However, they might be unaware of a crucial and unique option in this context.

Automatic data support
Every website lends virtual support to a structured data source, and that too by default. You can pull out or retrieve highly relevant data directly from the HTML. The process is termed as ‘web scraping’ and can ensure numerous benefits for you. Let’s check out how web scraping is useful and awesome.

Any content you view is ready for scraping
All of us download various stuff throughout the day. Whether it is music, important documents or images, downloads seem to be regular affairs. When you are successful in downloading any particular content of a page, it means the website offers unrestricted access to your browser. It won’t take long for you to understand that the content is programmatically accessible too. On that note, it’s high time to work out effective reasons that define the importance of web scraping. Before opting for RSS feeds, APIs, or other conventional data extraction methods, you should assess the benefits of web scraping. Here’s what you need to know in this context.

Website vs. APIs: Who’s the winner?
Site owners are more concerned about their public-facing or official websites than the structured data feeds. APIs can change, and feeds can shift without prior notifications. The breakdown of Twitter’s developer ecosystem is a crucial example for this.

So, what are the reasons for this downfall?
At times, these errors are deliberate. However, the crucial reasons are something else. Most of the enterprises are completely unaware of their structured data and information. Even if the data gets damaged, altered, or mangled, there’s no one to care about it.
However, that isn’t what happens with the website. When an official website stops functioning or delivers poor performance, the consequences are direct and in-your-face. Quite naturally, developers and site owners decide to fix it almost instantaneously.

Zero-rate limiting
Rate-limiting doesn’t exist for public websites. Although it’s imperative to build defences against access automation, most of the enterprises don’t care to do that. It’s only done if there are captchas on signups. If you aren’t making repeated requests, there are no possibilities of you being considered as a DDOS attack.

In-your-face data
Web scraping is perhaps the best way to gain access to crucial data. The desired data sets are already there, and you won’t have to rely on APIs or other data sources for gaining access. All you need to do is browse the site and find out the most appropriate data. Identifying and figuring out the basic data patterns will help you to a great extent.
Unknown and Anonymous access

You might want to gather information or collect data secretly. Simply put, you might wish to keep the entire process highly confidential. APIs will demand registrations and give you a key, which is the most important part of sending requests. With HTTP requests, you can stay secure and keep the process confidential, as the only aspects exposed are your site cookies and IP address. These are some of the reasons explaining the benefits of web scraping. Once you are through with these points, it’s high time to master the art of scraping.
Getting started with data extraction

If you are already eager to grab data, it’s high time you work on the blueprints for the project. Surprised? Well, data scraping or rather web data scraping requires in-depth analysis along with a bit of upfront work. While documentations are available with APIs, that’s not the case with HTTP requests. Be patient and innovative, as that will help you throughout the project.

2. Data fetching

Begin the process by looking for the URL and knowing the endpoints. Here are some of the pointers worth considering:
- Organized information: You must have an idea of the kind of information you want. If you wish to have it in an organized manner, rely on the navigation offered by the site. Track the changes in the site URL while you click through sections and sub-sections.
- Search functionality: Websites with search functionality will make your job easier than ever. You can keep on typing some of the useful terms or keywords based on your search. While doing so, keep track of URL changes.
- Removing unnecessary parameters: When it comes to looking for crucial information, the GET parameter plays a vital role. Try looking for unnecessary and undesired GET parameters in the URL, and removing them from the URL. Keep the ones that’ll help you load the data.
2. Pagination comes next

While looking for data, you might have to scroll down and move to subsequent pages. Once you click to Page 2, ‘offset=parameter’ gets added to the selected URL. Now, what is this function all about? The ‘offset=parameter’ function can represent either the number of features on the page or the page-numbering itself. The function will help you perform multiple iterations until you attain the “end of data” status.

Trying out AJAX
Most of the people nurture certain misconceptions about data scraping. While they think that AJAX makes their job tougher than ever, it’s actually the opposite. Sites utilising AJAX for data-loading ensures smooth data scraping. The time isn’t far away when AJAX will return along with JavaScript. Pulling up the ‘Network’ tab in Firebug or Web Inspector will be the best thing to do in this context. With these tips in mind, you will have the opportunity to get crucial data or information from the server. You need to extract the information and get it out of the page markup, which is the most difficult or tricky part of the process.

Unstructured data issues
When it comes to dealing with unstructured data, you will need to keep certain crucial aspects in mind. As stated earlier, pulling out the data from page markups is a highly critical task. Here’s how you can do it:
1. Utilising the CSS hooks
According to numerous web designers, the CSS hooks happen to be the best resources for puling data. Since it doesn’t involve numerous classes, CSS hooks offer straightforward data scraping.
2. Good HTML Parsing
Having a good HTML library will help you in ways more than one. With the help of a functional and dynamic HTML parsing library, you can create several iterations as and when you wish to.

Knowing the loopholes
Web scraping won’t be an easy affair. However, it won’t be a hard nut to crack either. While knowing the crucial web scraping tips is necessary, it’s also imperative to get an idea of the traps. If you have been thinking about it, we have something for you!
- Login contents: Contents that require you to login might prove to be potential traps. It reveals your identity and wreaks havoc on your project’s confidentiality.
- Rate limiting: Rate limiting can affect your scraping needs both positively and negatively, and that entirely depends on the application you are working on.
Parting thoughts

Extracting data the right way will be critical to the success of your business venture. With traditional data extraction methods failing to offer desired experiences, web designers and developers are embracing web scraping services. With these essential tips and tricks, you will surely gain data insights with perfect web scraping.

Source Url:- https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-easy-is-data-extraction

How Commercial Web Data Extraction Services Help Enterprise Growth

How Commercial Web Data Extraction Services Help Enterprise Growth

While the Internet is an ocean of information, it is important for businesses to access this data the smart way for their success in today’s world of cut-throat competition. However, the data on the web may not be open for all. Most sites do not provide an option of saving the data that’s displayed. This is precisely where web scraping services comes into the picture. There are endless applications of web scraping for business requirements. Web scraping provides value addition to multiple industry verticals in a multitude of ways:

Check out some of these scenarios.

Value proposition of web scraping for different industries

1. Collecting data from various sources to do analysis

There may be a need to analyze and gather data for a particular domain from several websites. This domain can be marketing, finance, industrial equipment, electronic gadgets, automobiles or real estate. Different websites belonging to different niches show information in diverse formats. It is also possible that you may not see the entire data at once in a single portal. The data could be distributed across many pages such as in results of a Google search under different sections. It is possible to extract data via a web scraper from various websites into a single database or spreadsheet. Thus, it becomes convenient for you to visualize or analyze the extracted data.

2. For research purpose

For any research, data is an important part, be it for scientific, marketing or for academic purpose. Web scrapers can help you to collect structured data from various sources on the net with great comfort.

3. For price comparison, market analysis, E-commerce or business

Businesses that cater to services or products for a particular domain must have detailed data of similar services or items that come to the market on a daily basis. Software for web scraping is useful to ensure a constant vigil on the data. All the necessary information can be accessible from various sources by only clicking a few buttons.

4. To track online presence

This is a key aspect of the web scraping where reviews and business profiles on the portals can be easily tracked. The information can then be used to assess the reaction of customers, user behavior, and the product performance. The crawlers can also check and list several thousands of user reviews and user profiles that are quite handy for business analytics.

5. Managing online reputation

It is a digital world today and more and more organizations are showing their keenness to spend resources on managing online reputation. So, web scraping is a necessary tool here too. While the management prepares its ORM strategy, the extracted data helps it to understand the target audiences to be reached and which areas could be vulnerable for the brand’s reputation. Web crawling can reveal important demographic data like the sentiment, GEO location, age group and gender in the text. When you have a proper understanding of these vulnerable areas, you can take leverage out of them.

6. Better targeted advertisements can be provided to the customers

Web scraping tools will not only give you figures but will also provide you with behavioral analytics and sentiments. So, you are aware of the types of audiences and the kinds of advertisements they would prefer to watch.

7. To collect opinion from public

Web scraping helps you to monitor particular organizational web pages from different social networks to collect updates on the views of the people on specific companies as well as their products. Collecting data is extremely important for the growth of any product.

8. Results of search engines can be scraped to track SEO

When the organic search results are scraped, it is easier to track your SEO rivals for a certain search term. It helps you to determine the keywords and the title tags that are being targeted by your competitors. Eventually, you have an idea of the keywords that are bringing in more web traffic to your website, the kind of contents, which are more appealing to the online users and the links that are attracting them. You also get to know the type of resources that will help to get your site a higher rank in the search results.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/commercial-web-data-extraction-services-enterprise-growth   

Screen Scraping - An Affordable Service for the Extraction of Data from Website

Screen Scraping - An Affordable Service for the Extraction of Data from Website

Want to get a data scraped from a website? If you say yes then it is not a tedious task at all if you take the benefit of screen scraping technology. Today, in this modern world getting information about a person living in another area or extracting data from websites is just like a free ride. Web screen scraping services could make data scraping a breeze for you.

For a layman, 'screen scraping' might sound technical. To put it in simple terms, it is a program or software that is designed to extract more than simple data. This unique programmed code drags complex data, large files, information, images from websites and this feature makes it altogether different from simple data mining. Sometimes, the contact details and addresses of many internet users prove to be valuable for websites in terms of business approach. Instead of waiting to get the information, website owners use this simple software and extract information of innumerable internet users. The process is extremely simple and easy and takes no time to present the data in the desired format you desire.

Furthermore, screen scraping is not just limited to extraction of data. It plays a pivotal role in submitting, filing web forms, monitoring social media, digging products from suppliers, archiving online data and more. More often, filing web forms becomes a daunting affair. With this perfect programming, the work becomes simple and hassle free. Furthermore, with this process, simplifying data extraction becomes stress free and more users friendly. It works more like a wonder in accomplishing the laborious and time consuming job in short span of time.

Website scraping is a program and hence it is developed. There are team of professionals who have possess deep knowledge and at the same time have mastered the art of designing this software that works miraculously in loading data from numerous websites. When in need, you can contact such team or group to get this software designed for you. There are many online firms that provide the excellent web scraping services. Sitting within the comforts of your home, you can get the program made in no time. Explore different websites, select one, contact their experts and avail their services. It also saves your time and much of your stress as well.

Furthermore, it is a paid service and hence you have to pay a price to get the work done. However, do not worry; it would not cost you a fortune. Another added advantage of this service is that it produces data within a short span of time.

So, hire a scraping expert and get the data extracted in no time.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/technology-articles/software-articles/screen-scraping-affordable-service-extraction-data-website-1246794.html#ixzz4hnCX4qpc

Get Scraping Success with Proxy Data Scraping

Get Scraping Success with Proxy Data Scraping

Have you ever heard of "data scraping? Data Scraping is the process of gathering relevant information in the public domain on the internet (private areas even if the conditions are met) and stored in databases or spreadsheets for later use in various applications. Scraping data technology is not new and a successful businessman his fortune by using data scraping technology.

Sometimes owners of sites that are not derived much pleasure from the automated harvesting of their data. Webmasters have learned to deny access to web scrapers their websites using tools or methods that some IP addresses to block the content of the site here. scrapers data is left to either target a different site, or the script to move the harvest of a computer using a different IP address each time and get as much information as possible to "all computers finally blocked the nozzle.

Fortunately, there is a modern solution to this problem. Proxy data scraping technology solves the problem by using a proxy IP addresses. When your data scraping program performs an extraction of a website, the site thinks that it comes from a different IP address. For site owner, proxies just like scratching a short period of increased traffic around the world. They have very limited resources and tedious to block such a scenario, but more importantly - for the most part, they simply do not know they are scraped.

Now you can ask. "Where can I proxy data scraping technology for my project" The "do-it-yourself solution is free, unfortunately, not easy at all Creation of a database scraping proxy network takes time and requires you to either a group of IP addresses and servers can be used in place yet, the computer guru you need to get everything configured correctly mention. You may consider hiring proxy servers hosting providers to select, but this option is usually quite expensive, but probably better than the alternative: dangerous and unreliable servers (but free) public proxy.

There are literally thousands of free proxy servers located all over the world are fairly easy to use. The trick is to find them. Hundreds of sites, list servers, but by placing a functioning, open and supports standard protocols that you need to a lesson in perseverance, trial and error will be. However, if you manage to find a working public representatives, there are dangers inherent in their use. First, you do not know who owns the server or activities taking place elsewhere on the server. Send applications or sensitive data via an open proxy is a bad idea. It's easy enough for a proxy server to keep all information you send or send it back to you to catch. If you choose the method of replacing the public, make sure you never a transaction through which you or anyone else would jeopardize the case of unsavory types are made aware of the data to send.

A less risky scenario for data scraping proxy is to hire a proxy connection that runs through the rotation of a large number of private IP addresses. There are a number of these companies available that claim to remove all Web logs, which you harvest anonymously on the web with a minimal threat of retaliation.

The other advantage is that companies that own such networks can often help design and implement a set of proxy data scraping custom program instead of trying to work with a generic bone scraping. After performing a simple Google search, I quickly found a company (http://www.emailscrapingservices.com/) that an anonymous proxy server provides for data scraping purposes. Or, according to their website, if you want to make life even easier, scrap goat can retrieve data for you and a variety of different formats to deliver, often before you could finish up your plate from the scraping program.

Whatever path you choose for your data scraping proxy need not let a few simple tips to thwart access to all the wonderful information that is stored on the World Wide Web!

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/business-articles/small-business-articles/get-scraping-success-proxy-data-scraping-259649.html#ixzz4hDqAAayx

3 Quick Steps For Improving Data Extraction Services

3 Quick Steps For Improving Data Extraction Services

Data extraction services have made it the forerunner in outsourcing data services. Before it, data mining is its basic step. Sorting, cleansing and trimming the scrappy data can be uphill tasks. So, the data extractor should have absolute knowledge of business purpose, feeling of ownership and cleverness of deriving necessary information from the company by himself to get quicker supply of the asked data.

Marketers have started eyeing on ‘Data’. Like any new line of an outfit brand, for sure, it is a new product that is in demand these days. Digitization has made it a new flavor to savour by corporate world. But mind it! Its biz is extended to government and non-government organizations as well. So if data is that much worthy, why should not the companies bank on the data?

Well, the business identities indulged in Data Mining services have understood how to calculate millions through Amazon.com, flipkart.com like ecommerce websites and internet world. These data dealers emphasize on brain and cater the extracted data. It’s not any simple but the most relevant, cleansed and processed data that meets business need.   

It’s like tussling with the scrappy data when extraction of data begins. While providing data extraction services in India or any other part of the world, it’s a prickly path to dig out the most relevant information suiting perfectly to your need. Let’s have a look how to make it free from mess and be unstressed:

1.   Decide ‘what’s the purpose’: The scientist of extraction of data should do in-depth study of your company for which he is hired. Invite him at your business place and make him engaged there. It conceives in his heart the idea of being so close and valuable. Let him know and face off what challenges you face and how do you encounter them. The deeper he gets in, the better he will bring out the result. Ask him to crack through daunting business challenges. Crystal clear image of the purpose will be yours. Half of the battle of finding relevant data will easily be won by you.  

2.    Feel as if you are owner: Although you are invited as the data-extractor, you should develop the sense of ownership. The one in this business has a large network of peer groups. These groups are unbeatable when it comes to open source data research. Working through open sources evokes ownership which helps in quicker, accurate and better data delivery. If you have no way to fetch information, you can have or devise your own tool. A good data-extractor does data mining with various resources; put them together and sort it out at the end for analysis.

3.    Get quick supply of every possible help from company: An enterprise or industry has so many employees on the board. However, each one’s job is restricted to certain dimensions. For catering the most accurate form of information, knowing context is not enough. The help of the company is also essential. You have to get in touch with data scientists and data engineers or researchers of the company. That company staff will unlock the door of complexities of knowing the company and its purpose exactly.

Source:http://www.articlesfactory.com/articles/business/3-quick-steps-for-improving-data-extraction-services.html

Willing to extract website data conveniently?

Willing to extract website data conveniently?

When it comes to data extraction process then it has become much easier as it was never before in the past. This process has now become automated. At present, data extraction is not done manually. It has become a very easy process to extract website data and save it in any format as per the suitability. You can easily extract data from a website and save it in your desired format. The only thing you need to take help of web data extraction software to fulfill your need. With the support of this software, you can easily extract data from any specific website in a fraction of seconds. You can conveniently extract data by using the software. Even though, there is a wide range of data extraction software available in the market today but you need to consider choosing the proven software that can facilitate you with great convenience.

In present scenario, web data scraping has become really easy for everyone and whole credit is goes to web data extraction software. The best thing about this software is that it is very easy to use and is fully capable to do the task effectively. If you really want to get much success in achieving data extraction from a website then you choose a web content extractor that is equipped with a wizard-driven interface. With this kind of extractor, you will surely be able to create a trustworthy pattern that will be easily used in terms of data extraction from a website as per your specific requirements. There is no doubt crawl-rules are really easy to come up with the use of good web extraction software by just pointing as well as clicking. The main benefit of using this extractor is that no strings of codes are needed at all which provides a huge assistance to any software user.

There is no denying to this fact that web data extraction has become fully automatic and stress-free with the support of data extraction software. In terms of enjoying hassle-free data extraction, it is essential to have an effective data scrapper or data extractor. At present, there are a number of people making good use of web data extraction software for the purpose of extracting data from any website. If you are also willing to extract website data then it would be great for you to use a web data extractor to fulfill your purpose.

Source:http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/6060643?articleid=6060643

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

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

How Data Entry is referenced in Popular Culture, Both Past and Present

Pop culture embraces all things relevant in media, particularly in movies, music, television, sports, news, fashion, and technology. It’s a focal point in Western culture, and serves to provide a point of reference for the majority of communication between people in today’s society. It also creates a common framework for interaction and helps to instill an overall sense of fellowship and commonality for people all over the world. Throughout this thread of pop culture over the past sixty years, there has been a recurrent underlying link in the form of data entry and all its various embodiments.

At first glance, data entry would seem to be an oddity in the course of pop culture references, yet it is undeniably present in numerous familiar contexts. Ever since society at large designated a recognizable concept of “pop culture” in the late 1950’s (arriving hand and hand with the influx of rock and roll in the United States and the U.K.), data in popular culture has been a staple in nearly every conceivable corner of media, and carries an even stronger presence today with the global architecture of the internet and interactive mobile devices.Data takes on a new, compelling shape when scrutinized under the following interesting, unique, and very specific pop culture references.

Popular Culture: The PresentData Collection, Research, and Analysis in Sports:

There are literally dozens of different sports that carry a ravenous fandom on their metaphorical shoulders. This multi-billion dollar industry extends to every possible section of media, consumer products, and events, whether it’s protein bars and sports drinks contracts with football players on the label, or multi-million dollar baseball stadiums in major cities, or even fantasy sports leagues in everyday homes. Data collection, research, and analysis is a fundamental backbone to every single aspect of the professional sports industry, a scientific process overseen by professional specialists and an analytics department.These data based methods aid professional sports teams in studying an athlete’s abilities and probabilities when contracting them and determining their value for joining certain teams, among other things.

Further examples of data research, collection and analysis in a professional sports context include:

- Determining baseball player batting averages or a footballer’s yards per carry
- Calculating an athlete’s winning percentages
- Tracking ballpark revenue
- Pricing and counting ticket sales for seats
- Tracking budgets for stadium maintenance
- Budgeting for the season
- Trading and signing players
- Data Mining, Collection, and Analysis in Comic Con:

While once symbolizing a small representation of “geek” culture, Comic Con is now a billion dollar global industry that brings in millions in revenue for the event’s host cities. With Con events taking place in New York, London, Los Angeles, Seattle, Sydney, and San Diego (to name just a few), Comic Con now embraces a wealth of popular culture, including blockbuster movies, televisions series, celebrity events, book signings, video games, and toys, and boasts attendance counts of close to 200,000 people per day. Companies like Xbox, Paramount Studios, Marvel, DC Comics, Universal Studios, and Blizzard rake in millions of dollars in product sales and guest fees, continuing to spurn the legitimacy of Comic Con as a lucrative entertainment event.
Data entry is integral to the management and organization of Comic Con, and requires teams of accountants, researchers, and analysts utilizing complex data mining, collection, processing, and analysis techniques.

These techniques are applied towards a multitude of areas, and some specific examples include:

- Determining popular events per location
- Studying social media for trending actors, shows, and movies
- Booking guests according to popular demand on social media
- Tracking attendance and ticket sales
- Contracting with local hotels and convention centers
- Obtaining feedback from participants
- Budgeting and paying for guests (like Playstation or HBO)
- Tracking and processing payments for product sales
- Popular Culture: The Past Data Collection and Research in Advertising

Advertising is currently one of the driving forces behind every brand, company, and product, and encompasses each segment of our daily interactions with all types of media. Yet the indispensability and impact of advertising on general public opinion and purchasing habits only became a part of popular culture in the early 1960’s, with brands like Marlboro, Ford, and Campbell’s Soup becoming household names due to clever advertising. The early 1960’s was the start of advertising on a mass media scale, and was used to heavily influence consumer spending. As advertising feasibility and significance grew, companies like Apple used clever advertising in the late 1980’s to bring awareness to their brand and build a following.

As advertising in the mid-20th century relied on data collection and research to reach their goals, the available methods were largely comprised of manual, laborious public opinion surveys, and product sales calculation.

Data collection and research methods were utilized towards the following examples:

- Calculating commercial ratings per advertisement
- Determining public favorability towards brands
- Budgeting for billboard and magazine ads
- Calculating product sales
- Data Entry in Science Fiction and Fantasy Culture

With the world on the cusp of frequent war from the 1910’s through the 1980’s, people yearned for an escape from the often depressing reality WWI, WWII, The Korean War, Vietnam, and the Cold War brought. The rise of Science Fiction and Fantasy genres in popular culture was widespread throughout books, movies, art, and television. Ray Bradbury, Tolkien, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Star Wars, and Alien encompassed all possible corners of media with rich sci-fi and fantasy art forms, and were incredibly popular throughout the early to late 20th century.Some based in the realities of scientific data collection, research, processing, or analysis, others offered glimpses of dazzling data entry usage in the forms of imaginative futuristic technology.

Data entry, in every conceivable shape, was referenced in this scope of Sci-Fi and Fantasy media in the following specific ways:

- Space navigation, travel, linguistic interpretation, and computing in the 1960’s Star Trek T.V. show.
- Of the 982 characters in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of Rings books (c. 1937), there are extensive databases that classify    statistics like race, gender, life expectancies, age, and relationships for each.
- The Star Wars movies (introduced in 1977) featured the Jedi Archives, a fictional collecting database which contained all the    in formation of the known galaxies.
- Bradbury’s War of the Worlds book (1898) inspired scientist Robert Goddard to invent special rockets for NASA space travel   through scientific based data collection and research.
- The hit 1979 movie Alien featured the ship “Nostromo,” which provided an advanced computer for the crew to access   information and data about destinations, crew members, company information, star systems, and history.

Source : https://www.dataentryoutsourced.com/blog/data-entry-referenced-in-popular-culture/

Scrape Data from Website is a Proven Way to Boost Business Profits

Data scraping is not a new technology in market. Several business persons use this method to get benefited from it and to make good fortune. It is the procedure of gathering worthwhile data that has been located in the public domain of the internet and keeping it in records or databases for future usage in innumerable applications.

There is a large amount of data available only through websites. However, as many people have found out, trying to copy data into a usable database or spreadsheet directly out of a website can be a tiring process. Manual copying and pasting of data from web pages is shear wastage of time and effort. To make this task easier there are a number of companies that offer commercial applications specifically intended to scrape data from website. They are proficient of navigating the web, evaluating the contents of a site, and then dragging data points and placing them into an organized, operational databank or worksheet.

Web scraping company

Every day, there are numerous websites that are hosting in internet. It is almost impossible to see all the websites in a single day. With this scraping tool, companies are able to view all the web pages in internet. If a business is using an extensive collection of applications, these scraping tools prove to be very useful.

It is most often done either to interface to a legacy system which has no other mechanism which is compatible with current hardware, or to interface to a third-party system which does not provide a more convenient API. In the second case, the operator of the third-party system will often see screen scraping as unwanted, due to reasons such as increased system load, the loss of advertisement revenue, or the loss of control of the information content.

Scrape data from website greatly helps in determining the modern market trends, customer behavior and the future trends and gathers relevant data that is immensely desirable for the business or personal use.


Source : http://www.botscraper.com/blog/Scrape-Data-from-Website-is-a-Proven-Way-to-Boost-Business-Profits

Data Entry Outsourcing - 6 Key Benefits of Outsourced Data Entry

The effective data typing services are must and have to outsource because of globalization. Without information, no company can go ahead and become successful. At every point of making decisions, proper information is essential. So data is one of the most important parts in any organization. There must be proper management to keep the business running smoothly and effectively.

If you want reliable source for data handling, hire typing service company to outsource data entry task. Currently, solutions for every type of business needs are available at reasonable rate. As business grow, it is very hard to manage huge information. So, companies are turning to data entry outsourcing.

Here are the key benefits of data entry outsourcing:

1. All-in-One: data entry firms are offering numbers of services like, data processing, scanning, information formatting, document conversion, indexing and others. They also understand your requirement and deliver the output required format such as Word, Excel, JPG, HTML, XML and Other.

2. Resolve the Issues: As company grows, there are many issues arise like information about employees, benefits, healthcare for them, tuning with rapidly changing technologies, latest business information and others. If organization outsources some of their responsibilities, various issues get resolved quickly and automatically.

3. Better Services: You can expect superior data management and high quality services from outsourcing companies. They have experienced and skilled professionals with latest technologies to deliver unexpected result and stay ahead of other.

4. Least Cost: You can lower down your capital cost of infrastructure and other cost of salary, stationery and other, if you outsource data typing task. Through offshore companies, you can easily save up to 60% on data typing services.

5. Higher Efficiency: If your employees are free from routine and uninteresting process of entering information, they can deliver better result. Ultimately, this can increase the job satisfaction level and efficiency. You can expect high output at lower costs.

6. Place of Outsourcing: You must think about the outsourcing country. India is chosen by various companies for data typing outsourcing. At India, you can get benefits of better quality, enough infrastructure, quick delivery, skilled experts at very low rates.

You can easily reduce tons of time-consuming and boring responsibilities by outsourcing.



Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Outsourcing---6-Key-Benefits-of-Outsourced-Data-Entry&id=4253927

To Know Difference Of Data Mining And Web Screen Scraping

To Know Difference Of Data Mining And Web Screen Scraping

Screen scraping to find information, where data mining can analyze information possible. This is a great simplification, so I will work a bit.

World Fast Forward, screen scraping websites than ever refers to extract information. Computer programs "crawl" or "spider" through web sites, pulls the data. For many people the comparison shopping engine, archive web pages, or a spreadsheet for a text so that it can be filtered to analyze things like build to download.

Data mining, on the other hand, is defined by Wikipedia as "the practice of automatically search large stores of data for patterns. Other words, you already know, and you know about the useful things about care. Thus we have the right pages of text data mining, automated data collection, web data extraction, and the bloody website is preferred.

If your two-card Treasure popular poker forums and read to your poker "data mining" many of the technical discussion of the saw, and thought how it can help you win more money. In this article I will give you an introduction to poker data mining and clarify some common misconceptions.

Poker data mining is a process where you (I) is a poker hand histories ("Data") collected in the game without taking part yourself. After the collected hand, you Holder Manager, your opponents to play in a program like Advanced Statistics can import. Normally determine the player playing style.

In addition, many people enjoy watching the high stakes games and save your favorite poker professionals with the hand history. For a special "hand grabber" data mine the program. A hand grabber a small program that runs in the background and the “clock” poker table for your computer, and protects them from the hand history, if any are found.

Invisible Shield as hard and strong that even if you have a knife to try and cut on the screen, you will surely fail. For an expensive mobile phone, screen protector because of your unfailing security forces has the best security. Transparent cover can hardly be seen because it is very thin. But this does not mean that it is not difficult if the scratches and resists any form.

In fact, invisible shield, even if you close your eyes, hold the phone, you can hardly see. Degree of protection as their heavy armor, although seem thin and irrelevant. Invisible Shield is just a shell for the phone, the phone is not interrupted. If you have a cable that you connect to the touch screen as before to use.

It is possible for you to buy full body armor kit, which is a security for the phone. Screen coverage is absolutely necessary, and the slope of the touch screen can also be purchased. But for the kit to buy the entire cover of the phone because it marks or scratches from all sides to protect the whole phone is recommended.

Source:http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/to-know-difference-of-data-mining-and-web-screen-scraping

By Data Scraping Services Are Important Tools Of Business

By Data Scraping Services Are Important Tools Of Business

Studies and market research on any company or organization plays an important role in strategic decision-making process. Data mining and web scraping techniques are important tools that the relevant information and to find information about your personal or business use. Many companies, self-employed, copy and paste the information into the website. This process is very reliable, but very expensive as it is a waste of time and effort to get results. This is due to the fact that information is collected and used less resources and time to collect these data will be compared.

Nowadays many data mining companies and their websites effective web scraping technique that precisely thousands of pages of information about the development of the crop can crawl. Criminal records CSV, database, XML file, or other source with a form. correlations and patterns in data, so that policies can be designed to help decision-making. Data can also be stored for later use.

The following are some common example of data extraction:

In order to scrap the government through the portal, citizens who are reliable given the study name to remove. Competitive pricing and product attribute data scraping websites You can open a web site or a web design office image upload videos and photos of scraping

Automatic data collection Regularly collects information. market it is possible to understand the customer's behavior and predict the likelihood of content changes.

The following are examples of automatic data collection:

Hourly monitoring of special shares
collects mortgage rates on a daily basis by various financial institutions
regularly need to check the weather report

By using web scraping services, it is possible to extract information related to your business. Since then analyzed the data to a spreadsheet or database can be downloaded and compared. Information storage database, or in the required format and interpretation of the correlations to understand and easier to identify hidden patterns.

Data mining services, it is possible pricing, shipping, database, your profile information and competitors' access to information.
Some of the challenges would be:

Web masters must change their website to be more user-friendly and better looking, in turn, violates the delicate scraper data extraction logic.

Block IP addresses: If you constantly keep your office scraping the site, IP "guard" From day one has been blocked.

Ellet not an expert in programming, you cannot receive data.

society abundant resources, the users of the service, which continues to operate them fresh data is transferred.

Source:http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/by-data-scraping-services-are-important-tools-of-business