Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:

• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection

Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:

• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4860417

Various Methods of Data Collection

Professionals in all the business industries widely use research, whether it is education, medical, or manufacturing, etc. In order to perform a thorough research, you need to follow few suitable steps regarding data collection. Data collection services play an important role in performing research. Here data is gathered with appropriate medium.

Types of Data

Research could be divided in two basic techniques of collecting data, namely: Qualitative collection of data and quantitative collection. Qualitative data is descriptive in nature and it does not include statistics or numbers. Quantitative data is numerical and includes a lot of figures and numbers. They are classified depending on the methods of its collection and its characteristics.

Data collected primarily by the researcher without depending on pre-researched data is called primary data. Interviews as well as questionnaires are generally found primary data/information collection techniques. Data collected from other means, other than by the researcher is secondary data. Company surveys and government census are examples of secondary collection of information.

Let us understand in detail the methods of qualitative data collection techniques in research.

Internet Data: Here there is a huge collection of data where one gets a huge amount of information for research. Researchers remember that they depend on reliable sources on the web for precise information.

Books and Guides: This traditional technique is authentically used in today's research.

Observational data: Data is gathered using observational skills. Here the data is collected by visiting the place and noting down details of all that the researcher observes which is needed for essential for his research.

Personal Interviews: Increases authenticity of data as it helps to collect first hand information. It does not serve fruitful when a big number of people are to be interviewed.

Questionnaires: Serves best when questioning a particular class. A questionnaire is prepared by the researcher as per the need of data-collection and forwarded to responders.

Group Discussions: A technique of collecting data where the researcher notes down details of what people in a group has to think. He comes to a conclusion depending on the group discussion that involves debate on topics of research.

Use of experiments: To obtain the complete understanding researchers conduct real experiments in the field used mainly in manufacturing and science. It is used to obtain an in-depth understanding of the researching subject.

Data collection services use many techniques including the above mentioned for collection. These techniques are helpful to the researcher in drawing conceptual and statistical conclusions. In order to obtain precise data researchers combine two or more of the data collection techniques.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Various-Methods-of-Data-Collection&id=5906957

How We Optimized Our Web Crawling Pipeline for Faster and Efficient Data Extraction

Big data is now an essential component of business intelligence, competitor monitoring and customer experience enhancement practices in most organizations. Internal data available in organizations is limited by its scope, which makes companies turn towards the web to meet their data requirements. The web being a vast ocean of data, the possibilities it opens to the business world are endless. However, extracting this data in a way that will make sense for business applications remains a challenging process.

The need for efficient web data extraction

Web crawling and data extraction is something that can be carried out through more than one route. In fact, there are so many different technologies, tools and methodologies you can use when it comes to web scraping. However, not all of these deliver the same results. While using browser automation tools to control a web browser is one of the easier ways of scraping, it’s significantly slower since rendering takes  a considerable amount of time.

There are DIY tools and libraries that can be readily incorporated into the web scraping pipeline. Apart from this, there is always the option of building most of it from scratch to ensure maximum efficiency and flexibility. Since this offers far more customization options which is vital for a dynamic process like web scraping, we have a custom built infrastructure to crawl and scrape the web.

How we cater to the rising and complex requirements

Every web scraping requirement that we receive each day is one of a kind. The websites that we scrape on a constant basis are different in terms of the backend technology, coding practices and navigation structure. Despite all the complexities involved, eliminating the pain points associated with web scraping and delivering ready-to-use data to the clients is our priority.

Some applications of web data demand the data to be scraped in low latency. This means, the data should be extracted as and when it’s updated in the target website with minimal delay. Price comparison, for example requires data in low latency. The optimal method of crawler setup is chosen depending on the application of the data. We ensure that the data delivered actually helps your application, in all of its entirety.

How we tuned our pipeline for highly efficient web scraping

We constantly tweak and tune our web scraping infrastructure to push the limits and improve its performance including the turnaround time and data quality. Here are some of the performance enhancing improvements that we recently made.

1. Optimized DB query for improved time complexity of the whole system

All the crawl stats metadata is stored in a database and together, this piles up to become a considerable amount of data to manage. Our crawlers have to make queries to this database to fetch the details that would direct them to the next scrape task to be done. This usually takes a few seconds as the meta data is fetched from the database. We recently optimized this database query which essentially reduced the fetch time to merely a fraction of seconds from about 4 seconds. This has made the crawling process significantly faster and smoother than before.

2. Purely distributed approach with servers running on various geographies

Instead of using a single server to scrape millions of records, we deploy the crawler across multiple servers located in different geographies. Since multiple machines are performing the extraction, the load on each server will be significantly lower which in turn helps speed up the extraction process. Another advantage is that certain sites that can only be accessed from a particular geography can be scraped while using the distributed approach. Since there is a significant boost in the speed while going with the distributed server approach, our clients can enjoy a faster turnaround time.

3. Bulk indexing for faster deduplication

Duplicate records is never a trait associated with a good data set. This is why we have a data processing system that identifies and eliminates duplicate records from the data before delivering it to the clients. A NoSQL database is dedicated to this deduplication task. We recently updated this system to perform bulk indexing of the records which will give a substantial boost to the data processing time which again ultimately reduces the overall time taken between crawling and data delivery.

Bottom line

As web data has become an inevitable resource for businesses operating across various industries, the demand for efficient and streamlined web scraping has gone up. We strive hard to make this possible by experimenting, fine tuning and learning from every project that we embark upon. This helps us maintain a consistent supply of clean, structured data that’s ready to use to our clients in record time.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-we-optimized-web-scraping-setup-for-efficiency