Web Scraping – Effective Way of Improving Market Presence

Web scraping is a technique that is fast making its presence felt in the world of internet by its sheer weight of being effective. It is a technique that uses software to crawl through the internet and gather up all the relevant and important information that one would need for their products.

The information gathered by the web scraping can be used for various things such as data integration, web mashup, online comparison of price and much more. Web scraping uses sophisticated software that crawls through the internet and gathers up all related information for the entity that you are looking for. The information that is gathered up is an automated, systematic, and very structured way. This allows for easy understanding of the gathered information. Though this is one of the best ways for data extraction there are quite a few things that one must be aware of before getting into web scraping.

Being aware of the following things keep you at a better position not only leverage the best deal, but also to negotiate properly.

•    For data mining the first thing that one should be very sure of is the kind of data they want. One has to define properly what kind of data they want and also what would be the purpose of the same. For an instance if you wish to get a closer look at your competitors, it would be a wise to let the data scraping service providers know who your competitors are. This would allow them to gather better information. Similarly if you are looking for getting new customers getting contact data from existing players in the respective industry would be helpful.

•    One should also be aware of the structure in which they want the data. A simple data structure has the entity name in the row and the property of the entity is kept in the cells of the rows. However, one can also opt for data structure in chart. Apart from the above, there is just one more thing that one needs to keep in mind while using the data mining services; it is the number of data extraction. At times a onetime data extraction would be sufficient whereas at other times periodic extractions or general reports are required.

If you are aware of all the above points, then you are very much inline of going ahead and taking the help of scrape website data. Knowing the above points would allow you to know what exactly to ask from your vendor and likewise quote. One can make the most of the data extraction services with the help of either the web scraping or web crawling services.

Source: https://3idatascraping.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/web-scraping-effective-way-of-improving-market-presence/

Some Traps to know and avoid in Web Scraping

In the present day and age, web scraping comes across as a handy tool in the right hands. In essence, web scraping means quickly crawling the web for specific information, using pre-written programs. Scraping efforts are designed to crawl and analyze the data of entire websites, and saving the parts that are needed. Many industries have successfully used web scraping to create massive banks of relevant, actionable data that they use on a daily basis to further their business interests and provide better service to customers. This is the age of the Big Data, and web scraping is one of the ways in which businesses can tap into this huge data repository and come up with relevant information that aids them in every way.

Web scraping, however, does come with its own share of problems and roadblocks. With every passing day, a growing number of websites are trying to actively minimize the instance of scraping and protect their own data to stay afloat in today’s situation of immense competition. There are several other complications which might arise and several traps that can slow you down during your web scraping pursuits. Knowing about these traps and how to avoid them can be of great help if you want to successfully accomplish your web scraping goals and get the amount of data that you require.

Complications in Web Scraping

Over time, various complications have risen in the field of web scraping. Many websites have started to get paranoid about data duplication and data security problems and have begun to protect their data in many ways. Some websites are not generally agreeable to the moral and ethical implications of web scraping, and do not want their content to be scraped. There are many places where website owners can set traps and roadblocks to slow down or stop web scraping activities. Major search engines also have a system in place to discourage scraping of search engine results. Last but not the least, many websites and web services announce a blanket ban on web scraping and say the same in their terms and conditions, potentially leading to legal issues in the event of any scraping.

Here are some of the most common complications that you might face during your web scraping efforts which you should be particularly aware about –

•    Some locations on the intranet might discourage web scraping to prevent data duplication or data theft.

•    Many websites have in place a number of different traps to detect and ban web scraping tools and programs.

•    Certain websites make it clear in their terms and conditions that they consider web scraping an infringement of their privacy and might even consider legal redress.

•    In a number of locations, simple measures are implemented to prevent non-human traffic to websites, making it difficult for web scraping tools to go on collecting data at a fast pace.

To surmount these difficulties, you need a deeper and more insightful understanding of the way web scraping works and also the attitude of website owners towards web scraping efforts. Most major issues can be subverted or quietly avoided if you maintain good working practice during your web scraping efforts and understand the mentality of the people whose sites you are scraping.

Common Problems

With automated scraping, you might face a number of common problems. The behavior of web scraping programs or spiders presents a certain picture to the target website. It then uses this behavior to distinguish between human users and web scraping spiders. Depending on that information, a website may or may not employ particular web scraping traps to stop your efforts. Some of the commonly employed traps are –

Crawling Pattern Checks – Some websites detect scraping activities by analyzing crawling patterns. Web scraping robots follow a distinct crawling pattern which incorporates repetitive tasks like visiting links and copying content. By carefully analyzing these patterns, websites can determine that they are being caused by a web scraping robot and not a human user, and can take preventive measures.

Honeypots – Some websites have honeypots in their webpages to detect and block web scraping activities. These can be in the form of links that are not visible to human users, being disguised in a certain way. Since your web crawler program does not operate the way a human user does, it can try and scrape information from that link. As a result, the website can detect the scraping effort and block the source IP addresses.

Policies – Some websites make it absolutely apparent in their terms and conditions that they are particularly averse to web scraping activities on their content. This can act as a deterrent and make you vulnerable against possible ethical and legal implications.

Infinite Loops – Your web scraping program can be tricked into visiting the same URL again and again by using certain URL building techniques.

These traps in web scraping can prove to be detrimental to your efforts and you need to find innovative and effective ways to surpass these problems. Learning some web crawler tips to avoid traps and judiciously using them is a great way of making sure that your web scraping requirements are met without any hassle.

What you can do

The first and foremost rule of thumb about web scraping is that you have to make your efforts as inconspicuous as possible. This way you will not arouse suspicion and negative behavior from your target websites. To this end, you need a well-designed web scraping program with a human touch. Such a program can operate in flexible ways so as to not alert website owners through the usual traffic criteria used to spot scraping tools.

Some of the measures that you can implement to ensure that you steer clear of common web scraping traps are –

•    The first thing that you need to do is to ascertain if a particular website that you are trying to scrape has any particular dislike towards web scraping tools. If you see any indication in their terms and conditions, tread cautiously and stop scraping their website if you receive any notification regarding their lack of approval. Being polite and honest can help you get away with a lot.

•    Try and minimize the load on every single website that you visit for scraping. Putting a high load on websites can alert them towards your intentions and often might cause them to develop a negative attitude. To decrease the overall load on a particular website, there are many techniques that you can employ.

•    Start by caching the pages that you have already crawled to ensure that you do not have to load them again.

•    Also store the URLs of crawled pages.

•    Take things slow and do not flood the website with multiple parallel requests that put a strain on their resources.

•    Handle your scraping in gentle phases and take only the content you require.

•    Your scraping spider should be able to diversify its actions, change its crawling pattern and present a polymorphic front to websites, so as not to cause an alarm and put them on the defensive.

•    Arrive at an optimum crawling speed, so as to not tax the resources and bandwidth of the target website. Use auto throttling mechanisms to optimize web traffic and put random breaks in between page requests, with the lowest possible number of concurrent requests that you can work with.

•    Use multiple IP addresses for your scraping efforts, or take advantage of proxy servers and VPN services. This will help to minimize the danger of getting trapped and blacklisted by a website.

•    Be prepared to understand the respect the express wishes and policies of a website regarding web scraping by taking a good look at the target ‘robots.txt’ file. This file contains clear instructions on the exact pages that you are allowed to crawl, and the requisite intervals between page requests. It might also specify that you use a pre-determined user agent identification string that classifies you as a scraping bot. adhering to these instructions minimizes the chance of getting on the bad side of website owners and risking bans.

Use an advanced tool for web scraping which can store and check data, URLs and patterns. Whether your web scraping needs are confined to one domain or spread over many, you need to appreciate that many website owners do not take kindly to scraping. The trick here is to ensure that you maintain industry best practices while extracting data from websites. This prevents any incident of misunderstanding, and allows you a clear pathway to most of the data sources that you want to leverage for your requirements.

Hope this article helps in understanding the different traps and roadblocks that you might face during your web scraping endeavors. This will help you in figuring out smart, sensible ways to work around them and make sure that your experience remains smooth. This way, you can keep receiving the important information that you need with web scraping. Following these basic guidelines can help you prevent getting banned or blacklisted and stay in the good books of website owners. This will allow you continue with your web scraping activities unencumbered.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/some-traps-to-avoid-in-web-scraping/

The Nasty Problem with Scraping Results from the Engines

One theme that I've been concerned with this week centers around data transparency in the search engine world. Search engines provide information that is critical to the business of optimizing and growing a business on the web, yet barriers to this data currently force many companies to use methods of data extraction that violate the search engines' terms of service.

Specifically, we're talking about two pieces of information that no large-scale, successful web operation should be without. These include rankings (the position of their site(s) vs. their competitors) for important keywords and link data (currently provided most accurately through Yahoo!, but also available through MSN and in lower quality formats from Google).

Why do marketers and businesses need this data so badly? First we'll look at rankings:

•    For large sites in particular, rankings across the board will go up or down based on their actions and the actions of their competition. Any serious company who fails to monitor tweaks to their site, public relations, press and optimization tactics in this way will lose out to competitors who do track this data and, thus, can make intelligent business decisions based on it.

•    Rankings provide a benchmark that helps companies estimate their global reach in the search results and make predictions about whether certain areas of extension or growth make logical sense. If a company must decide on how to expand their content or what new keywords to target or even if they can compete in new markets, the business intelligence that can be extracted from large swaths of ranking data is critical.

•    Rankings can be mapped directly to traffic, allowing companies to consider advertising, extending their reach or forming partnerships

And, on the link data side:

•    Temporal link information allows marketers to see what effects certain link building, public relations and press efforts have on a site's link profile. Although some of this data is available through referring links in analytics programs, many folks are much more interested in the links that search engines know about and count, which often includes many more than those that pass traffic (and also ignores/doesn't count some that do pass traffic).

•    Link data may provide references for reputation management or tracking of viral campaigns - again, items that analytics don't entirely encompass.

•    Competitive link data may be of critical importance to many marketers - this information can't be tracked any other way.

I admit it. SEOmoz is a search engine scraper - we do it for our free public tools, for our internal research and we've even considered doing it for clients (though I'm seriously concerned about charging for data that's obtained outside TOS). Many hundreds of large firms in the search space (including a few that are 10-20X our size) do it, too. Why? Because search engine APIs aren't accurate.

Let's look at each engine's abilities and data sources individually. Since we've got a few hundred thousand points of data (if not more) on each, we're in a good position to make calls about how these systems are working.

Google (all APIs listed here):

•    Search SOAP API - provides ranking results that are massively different from almost every datacenter. The information is often less than useless, it's actually harmful, since you'll get a false sense of what's happening with your positions.

•    AJAX Search API - This is really designed to be integrated with your website, and the results can be of good quality for that purpose, but it really doesn't serve the job of providing good stats reporting.

•    AdSense & AdWords APIs - In all honesty, we haven't played around with these, but the fact that neither will report the correct order of the ads, nor will they show more than 8 ads at a time tells me that if a marketer needed this type of data, the APIs wouldn't work.

Yahoo! (APIs listed here):

•    Search API - Provides ranking information that is a somewhat accurate map to Yahoo!'s actual rankings, but is occassionally so far off-base that they're not reliable. Our data points show a lot more congruity with Yahoo!'s than Google's, but not nearly enough when compared with scraped results to be valuable to marketers and businesses.

•    Site Explorer API - Shows excellent information as far as number of pages indexed on a site and the link data that Yahoo! knows about. We've been comparing this information with that from scraped Yahoo! search results (for queries like linkdomain: and site:) and those at the Site Explorer page and find that there's very little quality difference in the results returned, though the best estimate numbers can still be found through a last page search of results.

•    Search Marketing API - I haven't played with this one at all, so I'd love to hear comments from those who have.

MSN:

•    Doesn't mind scraping as long as you use the RSS results. We do, we love them and we commend MSN for giving them out - bravo! They've also got a web search SDK program, but we've yet to give it a whirl. The only problem is the MSN estimates, which are so far off as to be useless. The links themselves, though, are useful.

Ask.com

•    Though it's somewhat hidden, the XML.Teoma.com page allows for scraping of results and Ask doesn't seem to mind, though they haven't explicitly said anything. Again, bravo! - the results look solid, accurate and match up against the Ask.com queries. Now, if Ask would only provide links

I know a lot of you are probably asking:

•    "Rand, if scraping is working, why do you care about the search engines fixing the APIs?"

•    The straight answer is that scraping hurts the search engines, hurts their users and isn't the most practical way to get the data. Let me give you some examples:

•    Scraped queries have to look as much like real users as possible to avoid detection and banning - thus, they affect the query data that search engineers use to improve web search.

•    These queries also hit advertisers - falsifying the number of "real" impressions that advertisers see and lowering their CTRs unnaturally.

•    They take up search engine resources and though even the heaviest scraping barely impacts their server loads, it's still an annoyance.

•    With all these negative elements, and so many positive incentives to have the data, it's clear what's needed - a way for marketers/businesses to get the data they need without hurting the search engines. Here's how they can do it:

•    Provide the search ranking position of a site in the referral string - this works for ranking data, but not for link data and since Yahoo! (and Google) both send referrals through re-directs at times, it wouldn't be a hard piece to add.

•    Make the API's accurate, complete and unlimited

•    If the last option is too ambitious, the search engines could charge for API queries - anyone who needs the data would be more than happy to pay for it. This might help with quality control, too.

•    For link data - serve up accurate, wholistic data in programs like Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Search Submit (or even, Google Analytics). Obviously, you'd only get information about your own site after verifying.

I've talked to lots of people at the search engine level about making changes this week (including Jeremy, Priyank, Matt, Adam, Aaron, Brett and more). I can only hope for the best...

Source: http://moz.com/blog/the-nasty-problem-with-scraping-results-from-the-engines

How Extracting Job Postings Can Increase Revenue for Job Board Websites

For many people, job board websites present a great opportunity to bolster their search for their ideal job opening. They are the ideal avenue for prospective employers to meet right-fit employees. Employers post information about different openings in their companies, and job seekers respond to those posts with their profiles and resumes. This process gets carried out until the employer in question hits upon the right candidate for the job and the deal is closed.

For the job board website owner, revenue can come from many sources. Most job board websites charge membership fee from employers to put up their posts about vacant positions for the consideration of job seekers registered to the website. Revenue can also come from targeted advertising, premium services and profile upgrades for both hiring and seeking parties.

The most important wealth that any job board website can have is the sheer volume of job openings on display. With a large volume of openings, job board website owners not only get insight about market trends and opportunities, they can also lure both job seekers and employers to try out their services, thereby benefiting from their massive participation. This is one aspect where job board website owners can choose to crawl job websites to get targeted, relevant and organic information. Such informative and intelligent crawling can go on to bring about an overall increase in their revenue.

How Job Boards Work

Job boards work on a simple principle – providing a common platform where demand meets supply. Companies are always looking to hire the right people for their vacancies. Similarly bright professionals are always looking for a chance to get hired and go on to work with a reputed company. A job board website aims to be an interface between these two parties. They encourage job seekers to create accounts and profiles, while inviting prospective employers to make their own profiles and post their requirements in the form of job listings, much like posting classified advertisement in a newspaper. Interested candidates can then reply to these listings with their own information, resumes and cover letters to take the hiring process ahead.

To reach the optimal volume of job postings, seeker profiles and accurate information about all parties involved, one thing that can provide a giant boost to any job board website is scraping job websites. As the owner of a job board website, you can choose to scrape job listings for a wide number of practical and effective applications which can bring better revenue for your business.

How Does Scraping Work?

If you are looking to multiply your revenue, increase your reach and penetrate the already overcrowded job board market, you can choose to employ the services of a company that provides web scraping for job listings. Using the information you provide and the requirements that you specify, these professionals use a web scraper to crawl job listings across a large number of job board websites.

All the data that is received is stored for further examination and use. By using this technique, you can gather a wealth of important data on critical pointers, including detailed job seeker profiles, detailed employer profiles and accurate descriptions of actual, live job postings. This treasure trove of information can help you in a number of different ways.

For starters, you can be ensured that you always have a good volume of job postings in your job board website – a sure way to attract both job seekers and employers. You can also ensure that your job postings remain current and updated, and significantly cut down on your maintenance burden by employing this innovative and effective technique.

How Extracting Job Postings Can Help?

Extracting job listings from websites can be an immensely beneficial process for your job board website. It is a no-nonsense, hassle-free process that enables you to keep all your listings and all your job seeker profiles detailed, comprehensive and full of current and accurate information.

For a job board website, using data from publicly available websites for targeted use can give rise to some significant challenges –

•    Scale – You have to actively monitor thousands of relevant websites on a daily basis to ensure the integrity and reliability of the generated data.

•    Speed – You have to keep monitoring all your old resources over and over again to ensure that your listings remain current and any instance of an expired job listing gets flagged down so that you can remove it from your own job board website.

•    Breadth – You face the challenge of being able to regularly retrieve good quality content from websites which are difficult to access.

Recruitment Life Cycle

Using a highly customized, highly efficient and fully automated tool like a web scraper can help you overcome these challenges, and draw in significant revenues for your job board website. Handling such a vast and challenging task manually is not only counterintuitive, but it can also prove to be an extremely expensive undertaking in the long-term. Hiring professionals who can use automated tools for job scraping eliminates the drudgery and dreariness of this massive task. Additionally, it increases speed and efficiency, and makes it really easy for you to receive highly targeted and relevant information which is tailor made for your requirements. The data that you get from job site scraping is organic, actionable data which you can integrate in your business workflow and increase your revenue.

An efficient web scraper constantly scrapes job listings from a large number of high authority sources including job boards, online classified advertisements, Fortune 1000 websites, trade association websites and other sources. The fully automated process provides you with real-time information and feedback about changes and new additions to thousands of sources that feature job listings.

A highly customized web scraper can give a number of important advantages when it comes to scraping job boards. These advantages can help you with automating the process efficiently. This assists in cutting down on processed time duration and the proper streamlining of your web scraping endeavor –

•    You can monitor scores of important and relevant websites in real-time. You can also set up alerts the moment old job postings are taken down and new ones are posted.

•    You can customize web scraping tools to track particular data fields only for changes or updates. This way you can avoid repetitive reloading off old, already collected data.

•    You can also configure your web scraping tool to be agnostic towards changes in websites, thereby taking out a large chunk of possible maintenance time.

•    You can configure your web scraping tool to normalize and standardize data fields in resumes. This will make them ready for automated comparison and matching.

The Advantages

To compete in the highly competitive and saturated job board market, you need to go that extra mile with your own job board website. With the help of expert automated web scraping services, you can give your job board website the edge that it needs to survive and rise above the stiff competition.

You can continue to increase the scale of your operations and multiply your revenue. Using various means of web scraping you are able to provide authoritative, relevant and current information about job listings. When you successfully integrate automated web scraping into your workflow, it adds meaningful value on many levels -

Competitive Edge

You can surge ahead of the competition by offering your customers heightened speed and accuracy for all your job listings. Since you get real-time alerts when new job postings are added and old ones are removed, you can make information available to your customers within a short span of time. Thus, you can ensure that all content on your job board website stays current and updated.

Crawl Job boards

Quality Listings

You can bring in new business by offering a detailed and comprehensive list of job listings both in terms of quality and volume. Using a highly customized and sophisticated automated web scraping tool to gather your information works in your favor. It enables you to further simplify your access to specialized niches like classifieds sections of online newspapers, trade association websites and message boards.

Tremendous Value-add

You can provide more value to potential employers by maintaining a large database containing job seeker profiles. These are accurate right down to the very last detail. This can be achieved efficiently by scraping and storing full profiles at high speeds. You can then configure your scraper to record any changes or updates to individual profiles.

Targeted profiling

You can provide your customers with information that goes an extra mile and establishes a differentiating factor from your competitors. This can be achieved easily by fine tuning your web scraping efforts. Here, you need to enhance individual profiles by adding and supplementing them with further external information. This information can be pulled from public sources like social networks and on boarded with your existing profiles.

High degree of accuracy

You can achieve unmatched accuracy while matching applicant profiles to specific job listings. This can be achieved by normalizing important fields of applicant profiles and resumes to support fast, efficient automated comparisons, checks and matches.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-scraping-job-postings-from-job-portals-helps-job-board-websites/