Sunday, January 30, 2011

Web Scraping

“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.” ~Stewart Brand

A recent survey showed that the average person spends 12 to 15 hours each week on the web. During this time, they will visit more than 25 websites and spend a chunk of it on Facebook.

So much of what drives a purchasing decision on the web is what people read about a product or service from other consumers. If I read a bad review about a hotel that I was considering, clearly, I will not stay there. On the other hand, if I see great reviews about a new tech gadget, I will seriously consider purchasing it.

The more you know about what your customers are reading and what is influencing their decisions, the greater your success. This was not possible in the past. Now, however, new web-scraping software mines data on the web, automatically extracting valuable information for analysis.

One of the leaders in this field is Mozenda, which offers a neat web-scraping product at very reasonable prices. Rates start at $99 to scrape 5,000 pages or images of websites a month. There are also free web scraping programs at www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/web_scraping_software/.

Businesses can use this software to monitor blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites to keep tabs on what people are saying about their products. With this technology, so much more information can be learned before a problem develops, enabling a more timely response.

If Apple had been monitoring blogs, it would have known the extent of the iPhone 4's problems (dropped calls) and seen how dissatisfaction was escalating. The company could have responded more quickly to the growing negative remarks.

There is an overabundance of information available online. With astronomical amounts of data swirling around out there, shoppers rely more and more on the information provided by other consumers to make decisions. Knowing this, many firms let customers comment on their products and services right there on their websites.

Take QVC and HSN, for example. On their sites, consumers can comment on each item sold. When a product does incredibly well in consumer input, they frequently mention this on the air.

Web scraping analysis should be part of each firm's marketing budget because it will become an even more dominant marketing tool. Now go out and see if you can apply web-scraping software to your business in a cost-effective way.

You can do this!

11 comments:

  1. Please, take a look at my personal project at http://www.heliumscraper.com.

    Is a web scraper that solves the web scraping problem from a different perspective.

    ReplyDelete
  2. We here at http://MarabouStork.co.uk offer a SAAS (Software as a service) application that we configure for our customers that will selectively navigator around pages extracting only the information they want.

    The key to our service is that it is that all scraping is done in a responsible manner, usually out of hours, and never to such an extend that the source web sites performance suffers.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello Dude,

    Web scraping is the process of automatically collecting web information. 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. Thanks for sharing it......

    Best Web Scraping Software

    ReplyDelete
  4. One thing which I always says is words always matter. I never met loginworks manager or owner but I am confident about their work and today I am recommending them only because of their words. When I contacted them for service one word which I remember was “Don’t worry we are here” and believe me that actually happened. They were always there to help me out. I got my website raised up and found all the changing stuffs and yes, they were the best. Now I can say with proud I chose right persons for myself. Live long Login works and make others proud by your work.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. With our Script Scraper software lets you use Javascript to download data.

    ReplyDelete
  7. It is important to understand that the process of web scraping is an important process when it comes to collecting of information from databases and websites.
    Most of the times the process is known as web harvesting or data extraction. It is regarded as a technique that is used in extracting information or data from websites.And the web scraping can be used to collect any information that concerns your customers. The information can be collected from the forums, blogs and social networks..

    Using Web Scraping in Business

    ReplyDelete
  8. Enukesoftware develops custom web scarping software according to your need.

    Web scarping software development.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Business owners are extracting the information of many internet users in their website and this readily helps them to grow their business.

    Tripadvisor Reviews Scraper

    ReplyDelete
  10. Web scrapping industrialzed,
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvMeL6c14ak
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0Etul5kHuc
    https://appliedalgo.com/appliedalgoweb/doc/AppliedAlgo%20Application%20Scenario%20Internet%20Download.pdf

    ReplyDelete
  11. Thanks for sharing the practical solutions for catalyzing business growth and development. This helped me acknowledge the significance of choosing a professional and trained HTML developer, but I cannot locate the right platform for hiring developers for my projects. Please share the solutions to hire them with the right strategy?

    ReplyDelete