Top 7 Applications of Web Scraping You Need to Know

You do have a vague idea of how web scraping can be leveraged. 

You can ever cite one or two case studies.

But not sure about its wide-ranging applications in different areas?

No worries!

Many people are unaware of interesting and innovative applications of web scraping for highly specific requirements.

Hence, we have come up with this blog that details some of the quirky web scraping applications that you may not have heard of.

Take a read!

Let’s look at Applications of Web Scraping

 

 

MAP Compliance

• If you are a manufacturer, you would want to keep track of whether retailers follow and comply with the minimum price norms or not. 
• Manually, there’s no way to monitor it. How many retailers can you keep track of manually, even if it were possible?
• This is where web scraping comes in quite handy. With the help of powerful web scraping tools, you can monitor MAP compliance and take necessary action if need be.

 

Job Boards

• Do you ever wonder how the job boards maintain up-to-date job-related information?
• It would be hard to keep track of so many job postings coming up in so many companies and changes occurring in their thousands of websites. 
• Hence, job boards make use of crawlers to crawl and access the minute details regarding job postings on these websites. This enables them to gather detailed information on diverse aspects such as job postings, job descriptions, designations, experience and qualification norms and other details. Web scraping is at the back of it all!  

 

 

News Data Aggregation for Equity and Financial Research

• When it comes to equity markets, the devil is at times in the news! So if you could churn the news related data and glean important information, you could predict specific stock movement and market sentiment.
• Manually, it would take ages to gather this data and process it. 
• Now comes web scraping! With web scraping, you can do it in a flash. A number of traders and financial institutions aggregate news and other data. In this way, they can arrest the market movement as it starts and leverage from the onset of a new trend. 

 

 

Images and Product Descriptions

• Let’s say, you want to start an eCommerce company. You would need thousands of product-related images, descriptions etc. How would you develop it all overnight?
• If you sit down to create it, it would take weeks and months. So not viable, right?
• You would be surprised to know that web scraping can help you get hold of countless product images and descriptions from any website in no time. A score of eCommerce companies keep extracting product information in this way and set up their shop online!

 

Competitor Price Monitoring

• In the eCommerce business, price is everything. It’s the heart of your strategy but it depends on your competitor’s pricing strategy. To work out your pricing strategy, you need to keep track of how your competitors are pricing their products.
• Web scraping is used for scraping price-related data so that it’s possible to monitor your competitor’s prices. In this way, keeping track of your competitor’s prices is automated and real-time price-related data is made available!

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Machine Learning Training Models

• Machine learning is all about feeding data into machines for them to imbibe it and sharper their knowledge about various things. 
• The web is the best possible source for such data but it’s not easy to get hold of this data. You can copy and paste some but you cannot do it for large quantities of data. 
• Therefore, web scraping is used for extracting large quantities of web data which can then be fed into machines. This is what enables machine learning models to be trained.  

 

 

Lead Generation

• Business is all about leads. The more leads you can generate, the more it’s likely that you can convert and accelerate your business.
• But manually trying to create leads from different sources scattered all over is not easy. Considering the urgency of business operations, it’s not viable either to wait for ages to generate those leads.
• This is why businesses harness the power of web scraping for lead generation. They automate the process of generating leads and also ensure that they scale it up. In short, businesses have applied web scraping for lead generation for some time now and those who can leverage it more and have a much better edge!

 

Conclusion

Whether it’s business, equity research, job boards or eCommerce, web scraping has redefined the way data is extracted and used for these varied exercises. 

 

Since data is such a vital element in every conceivable process, individuals and institutions have discovered novel and unusual ways in which web scraping is applied in their day-to-day operations. 

 

This blog is only indicative of the innovative ways in which web scraping applications have been integrated in the different areas all around us. 

 

So it’s hardly an option now; it’s becoming a compulsion to apply web scraping for whatever your area of work is. 

  

Hence, take this opportunity to see how you can leverage web scraping applications in your field of work and take it to the next level!