Web scraping, also known as web data extraction, is the process of retrieving publicly accessible data from websites either manually or automatically using software-based tools. Automated tools are the perfect option for beginners, but the market offers plenty of options, making it hard to choose the best one for your case. This article, therefore, is your guide to help you choose the best web scraping tool.
Business Applications of Web Scraping
You can use the best web scraping tools in many ways:
- Brand monitoring: Web scraping can enable you to monitor your brand’s reputation. You can, for instance, learn how news outlets are reporting about your products.
- SEO monitoring: You can scrape search engine results pages (SERPs) for data such as high-ranking keywords for topics and top-ranked web pages, which can help you tailor your SEO and content strategy.
- Ad verification: For ads to achieve the desired results, they must be delivered as intended and through designated channels or websites. But how do you determine that this has happened? You do it through a process called ad verification. Here, you extract data about your ads to verify which sites are running them and whether they are viewable.
- Market research: Web scraping lets you collect market intelligence. You can retrieve region or country-specific data related to products in a particular segment, competitors, and more.
- Price and competitor monitoring: You can scrape pricing data from e-commerce sites. This data can help you analyze how your competitors have priced their products, giving you the basis to adjust your prices accordingly to generate more sales.
- Review tracking and customer sentiment monitoring: You can scrape review sites and social media sites to uncover what customers are saying about your business or products.
- AI training: Although generative AI tools are growing in popularity, there are concerns that these tools hallucinate and make up information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one way to address this problem without retraining the models. And web scraping is instrumental to this process.
- Lead generation: Businesses can extract contact details from social media platforms and websites for email marketing or recruiting employees.
- Data aggregation: Web scraping helps businesses collate data from different sources, including social media platforms, websites, research reports, and more.
Web Scraping Tools
There are several categories of web scraping tools:
- Web scraping application programming interface (API): This is by far the most common category of web scraping tools. They are easy for the user to set up and maintain, as the provider handles everything. But how do they work? Essentially, you send a request to the API containing the target URL and additional information, such as the language and location. The API then fetches, processes, and returns the data, adhering to the instructions you set. Some examples of the best web scraping tools in this category include Oxylabs Web Scraper API and Decodo’s Web Scraping API.
- Web scraping software: There are standalone, plug-and-play data extraction tools. For example, Web Scraper, one of the best web scraping solutions in this category, is available as a browser extension. Yet it enables you to extract large volumes of data.
- Custom scrapers: Beautiful Soup, Selenium, lxml, and Requests are popular Python web scraping libraries. You can also use Scrapy, a Python framework that is also a complete web scraping solution. And if you wish to use JavaScript, you can use Puppeteer to automate headless browsers. These web scrapers under this category are usually open source.
- Cloud-based web scraping platforms: These platforms offer Data-as-a-Service. A server located in a data center handles the data extraction. Examples of the best cloud-based web scraping platforms include ScrapeHero Cloud and Web Scraper Cloud.
Open-Source vs. Commercial Web Scraping Tools
The solutions in the four categories above can broadly be grouped into open-source and commercial tools.
| Open-Source Tools | Commercial Tools | |
| Technical Knowledge | You must have advanced technical knowledge or a programming background to develop these tools | They are plug-and-play and require little to no technical knowledge to set up, configure, and run |
| Features | They have limited capabilities and features | They offer advanced features as providers seek to differentiate their products from the rest |
| Price | Open-source web scraping frameworks, libraries, and tools are free. Nonetheless, they are costly to develop. | Commercial tools are not free |
| Scalability | Open-source tools are limited to small-scale web scraping tasks | Commercial tools can be used in both small- and large-scale web scraping tasks |
| Performance | The performance can be lackluster | Providers usually test their products before deployment, guaranteeing high performance |
Features of Efficient Web Scraping Tools
The best web scraping tools offer the following features:
- Proxy integration to enable location targeting
- Proxy rotation
- Proxy management
- Headless browser for JavaScript rendering
- CAPTCHA solving
- Excellent user interface that enhances the user experience
- Scalability
- Integrations with third-party tools
- Support for various data export formats, including JSON, CSV, TXT, HTML, and XML
- Automation, e.g., automatic retries and automated interactions with the website
Conclusion
While there are plenty of web scraping solutions in the market today, some stand out. The best web scraping tools offer advanced features, enabling you to scrape even the most dynamic websites. They also allow you to collect country- or region-specific data.
