Data Collection Techniques for a Successful Thesis

Irrespective of the grade of the topic and the subject of research you have chosen, basic requirement and process of all remains same i.e. "research". Re-search in itself means searching on a searched content and this involves some proven fact along with some practical figures reflecting the authenticity and reliability of the study. These facts and figures which are required to prove the fundamentals of study are known as "data's".

These data's are collected according to the demand of research topic and its study undertaken. Also their collection techniques vary along with the topic in detail for example if the topic is like "Changing era of HR policies", the demanded data would be subjective and its technique thus depends on the same. Whereas if the topic is like "Causes of performance appraisal", then the demanded data would be objective and in the terms of figures which shows different parameters, reasons and factors affecting performance appraisal of different number of employees. So, let's have a broader look on the different data collection techniques which gives a reliable ground to your research -

• Primary Technique - Here, the data is collected by the first hand source directly are known as primary data's. Self-analysis is a sub classification of primary data collection - As understood; here you get self-response for a set of questions or a study. For example - personal in-depth interviews and questionnaires are self-analyzed data collection techniques, but its limitation lies in the fact that self-response can be sometimes biased or even confused. On the other, hand the advantage is in the court of most updated data as it is directly collected from the source.

• Secondary Technique - In this technique the data is collected from the pre-collected resources they are called as secondary data's. Data's are collected from articles, bulletins, annual reports, journals, published papers, government and non-government documents and case studies. Limitation of these is that they may not be the updated one or may be manipulated as it is not collected by the researcher itself.

Secondary data is easy to collect as they are pre-collected and are preferred when there is lack of time whereas primary data's are tough to amass. Thus, if researcher wants to bring up to date, reliable and factual data's they should prefer primary source of collection. But, these data collection techniques vary according to problem generated in the thesis. Hence, go through the demands of your thesis first before indulging yourself into data collection.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Collection-Techniques-for-a-Successful-Thesis&id=9178754

How Web Crawling Can Help Venture Capital Firms

How Web Crawling Can Help Venture Capital Firms

Venture capital firms are constantly on the lookout of innovative start-ups for investment. Whether you provide financial capital to early-stage start-ups in IT, software products, biotechnology or other booming industries, you will need the right information as soon as possible. In general, analysing media data to discover and validate insights is one of key areas in which analysts work. Hence, constantly monitoring popular media outlets is one of the ways VCs can deploy to spot trends. Read on to understand how web crawling can not only speed up this whole process but also improve the workflow and accuracy of insights.

What is web crawling

Web crawling simply refers to the use of automated computer programs to visit websites and extract specific bits of information. This is the same technology used by search engines to find, index and serve search results for user queries. Web crawling, as you’d have guessed is a technical and niche process. It takes skilled programmers to write programs that can navigate through the web to find and extract the needed data.

There are DIY tools, vertical specific data providers and DaaS (Data as a service) solutions that VC firms can deploy for crawling.  Although there is the option of setting up an in-house crawling setup, this isn’t recommended for Venture Capital firms. The high tech-barrier and complexity of web crawling process can lead to loss of focus for the VC firms. DaaS can be the ideal option as it’s suitable for recurring and large-scale requirements which only a hosted solution can offer.

How web crawling can help Venture Capital firms

Crawling start-up and entrepreneurship blogs using a web crawling service can help VC firms avail the much-needed data that they can use to discover new trends and validate their research. This can complement the existing research process and make it much more efficient.

1. Spot trends

Spotting new trends in the market is extremely important for venture capital firms. This helps identify the niches that have high probability of bringing in profit. Since investing in companies that have higher chances of succeeding is what Venture capital firms do, the ability to spot trends becomes an invaluable tool.

Web crawling can harvest enough data to identify trends in the market. Websites like Techcrunch and Venturebeat are great sources of start-up related news and information. Media sites like these talk about trending topics constantly. To spot trends in the market, you could use a web crawling solution to extract the article title, date and URL for the current time period and run this data through an analytics solution to identify the most used words in the article titles and URLs. Venture capital firms can then use these insights to target newer companies in the trending niches. Technology blogs, forums and communities can be great places to find relevant start-ups.

2. Validate findings

The manual research by the analysts needs to be validated before the firm can go ahead with further proceedings. Validation can be done by comparing the results of the manual work with the relevant data extracted using web crawling. This not only makes validation much easier but also helps in the weeding out process, thus reducing the possibilities of making mistakes. This can be partially automated by using intelligent data processing/visualisation tools on top the data.

3. Save time

Machines are much faster than humans. Employing web crawling to assist in the research processes in a venture capital firm can save the analysts a lot of time and effort. This time can be further invested in more productive activities like analytics, deep research and evaluation.

Source:-https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/web-crawling-for-venture-capital-firms

Why Customization is the Key Aspect of a Web Scraping Solution

Why Customization is the Key Aspect of a Web Scraping Solution

Every web data extraction requirement is unique when it comes to the technical complexity and setup process. This is one of the reasons why tools aren’t a viable solution for enterprise-grade data extraction from the web. When it comes to web scraping, there simply isn’t a solution that works perfectly out of the box. A lot of customization and tweaking goes into achieving a stable setup that can extract data from a target site on a continuous basis.

Customization web scraping service

This is why freedom of customization is one of the primary USPs of our web crawling solution. At PromptCloud, we go the extra mile to make data acquisition from the web a smooth and seamless experience for our client base that spans across industries and geographies. Customization options are important for any web data extraction project; Find out how we handle it.

The QA process

The QA process consists of multiple manual and automated layers to ensure only high-quality data is passed on to our clients. Once the crawlers are programmed by the technical team, the crawler code is peer reviewed to make sure that the optimal approach is used for extraction and to ensure there are no inherent issues with the code. If the crawler setup is deemed to be stable, it’s deployed on our dedicated servers.

The next part of manual QA is done once the data starts flowing in. The extracted data is inspected by our quality inspection team to make sure that it’s as expected. If issues are found, the crawler setup is tweaked to weed out the detected issues. Once the issues are fixed, the crawler setup is finalized. This manual layer of QA is followed by automated mechanisms that will monitor the crawls throughout the recurring extraction, hereafter.

Customization of the crawler

As we previously mentioned, customization options are extremely important for building high quality data feeds via web scraping. This is also one of the key differences between a dedicated web scraping service and a DIY tool. While DIY tools generally don’t have the mechanism to accurately handle dynamic and complex websites, a dedicated data extraction service can provide high level customization options. Here are some example scenarios where only a customizable solution can help you.

File download

Sometimes, the web scraping requirement would demand downloading of PDF files or images from the target sites. Downloading files would require a bit more than a regular web scraping setup. To handle this, we add an extra layer of setup along with the crawler which will download the required files to a local or cloud storage by fetching the file URLs from the target webpage. The speed and efficiency of the whole setup should be top notch for file downloads to work smoothly.

Resize images

If you want to extract product images from an Ecommerce portal, the file download customization on top of a regular web scraping setup should work. However, high resolution images can easily hog your storage space. In such cases, we can resize all the images being extracted programmatically in order to save you the cost of data storage. This scenario requires a very flexible crawling setup, which is something that can only be provided by a dedicated service provider.

Extracting key information from text

Sometimes, the data you need from a website might be mixed with other text. For example, let’s say you need only the ZIP codes extracted from a website where the ZIP code itself doesn’t have a dedicated field but is a part of the address text. This wouldn’t be normally possible unless you write a program to be introduced into the web scraping pipeline that can intelligently identify and separate the required data from the rest.
Extracting data points from site flow even if it’s missing in the final page

Sometimes, not all the data points that you need might be available on the same page. This is handled by extracting the data from multiple pages and merging the records together. This again requires a customizable framework to deliver data accurately.

Automating the QA process for frequently updated websites

Some websites get updated more of than others. This is nothing new; however, if the sites in your target list get updated at a very high frequency, the QA process could get time-consuming at your end. To cater to such a requirement, the scraping setup should run crawls at a very high frequency. Apart from this, once new records are added, the data should be run through a deduplication system to weed out the possibility of duplicate entries in the data. We can completely automate this process of quality inspection for frequently updated websites.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/customization-is-the-key-aspect-of-web-scraping-solution

7 Best Web Scraping Software tools to Acquire Data Without Coding

Ever since the world wide web started growing in terms of data size and quality, businesses and data enthusiasts have been looking for methods to extract this data from the web. Today, there are various ways to acquire data from websites of your preference. Some are meant for hobbyists and some are suitable for enterprises. DIY web scraping software belong the former category. If you need data from a few websites of your choice for a quick research or project, these tools are more than enough. DIY web scraping tools are much easier to use in comparison to programming your own web scraping setup. Here are some of the best web scraping software available in the market right now.

best web scraping software

1. Outwit Hub
Outwit hub is a Firefox extension that can be easily downloaded from the Firefox add-ons store. Once installed and activated, it gives web scraping capabilities to your browser. Out of the box, it has data points recognition features that can make your scraping job easier. Extracting data from sites using Outwit hub doesn’t demand programming skills. The set up is fairly easy to learn. You can refer to our guide on using Outwit hub to get started with web scraping using the tool. As it is free of cost, it makes for a great option if you need to scrape some data from the web quickly.

2. Web Scraper Chrome Extension
Web scraper is a great alternative to Outwit hub which is available for Google Chrome that can be used for web scraping. It lets you set up a sitemap (plan) on how a website should be navigated and what data should to be extracted. It can scrape multiple pages simultaneously and even has dynamic data extraction capabilities. Web scraper can also handle pages with JavaScript and Ajax, which makes it all the more powerful. The tool lets you export the extracted data to a CSV file. The only downside to web scraper extension is that it doesn’t have many automation features built in. Learn how to use web scraper to extract data from the web.

3. Spinn3r
Spinn3r is a great choice for scraping entire data from blogs, news sites, social media and RSS feeds. Spinn3r uses firehose API that manages 95% of the crawling and indexing work. It gives you the option to filter the data that it scrapes using keywords, which helps in weeding out irrelevant content. The indexing system of Spinn3r is similar to Google and saves the extracted data in JSON format. Spinn3r works by continuously scanning the web and updating their data sets. It has an admin console packed with features that lets you perform searches on the raw data. Spinn3r is an ideal solution if your data requirements are limited to media websites.

4. Fminer
Fminer is one of the easiest to use web scraping tools out there that combines top-in-class features. Its visual dashboard makes extracting data from websites as simple and intuitive as possible. Whether you want to scrape data from simple web pages or carry out complex data fetching projects that require proxy server lists, ajax handling and multi-layered crawls, Fminer can do it all. If your web scraping project is fairly complex, Fminer is the software you need.

5. Dexi.io
Dexi.io is a web based scraping application that doesn’t require any download. It is a browser based tool that lets you set up crawlers and fetch data in real-time. Dexi.io also has features that will let you save the scraped data directly to Box.net and Google drive or export it as JSON or CSV files. It also supports scraping the data anonymously using proxy servers. The data you scrape will be hosted on their servers for up to 2 weeks before it’s archived.

6. ParseHub
Parsehub is a web scraping software that supports complicated data extraction from sites that use AJAX, JavaScript, redirects and cookies. It is equipped with machine learning technology that can read and analyse documents on the web to output relevant data. Parsehub is available as a desktop client for windows, mac and linux and there is also a web app that you can use within the browser. You can have up to 5 crawl projects with the free plan from Parsehub.


7. Octoparse
Octoparse is a visual web scraping tool that is easy to configure. The point and click user interface lets you teach the scraper how to navigate and extract fields from a website. The software mimics a human user while visiting and scraping data from target websites. Octoparse gives the option to run your extraction on the cloud and on your own local machine. You can export the scraped data in TXT, CSV, HTML or Excel formats.

Tools vs Hosted Services
Although web scraping tools can handle simple to moderate data extraction requirements, these are not a recommended solution if you are a business trying to acquire data for competitive intelligence or market research. When the requirement is large-scale and/or complicated, web scraping tools fail to live up to the expectations. DIY tools can be the right choice if your data requirements are limited and the sites you are looking to scrape are not complicated. If you need enterprise-grade data, outsourcing the requirement to a DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) provider would be the ideal option. Dedicated web scraping services will take care of end-to-end data acquisition and will deliver the required data, the way you need it.

If your data requirement demands a custom built set up, a DIY tool cannot cover it. For example, if you need product data of the best selling products from Amazon at a predefined frequency, you will have to consult a web scraping provider instead of using a software. With a software, the customization options are limited and automation is almost non-existent. Tools also come with the downside of maintenance, which can be a daunting task. A scraping service provider will set up monitoring for the target websites and make sure that the scraping setup is well maintained. The flow of data will be smooth and consistent with a hosted solution.

Source url :-https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/best-web-scraping-software-tools-extract-data

Data Scraping Doesn’t Have to Be Hard

All You Need Is the Right Data Scraping Partner

Odds are your business needs web data scraping. Data scraping is the act of using software to harvest desired data from target websites. So, instead of you spending every second scouring the internet and copying and pasting from the screen, the software (called “spiders”) does it for you, saving you precious time and resources.

Departments across an organization will profit from data scraping practices.

Data scraping will save countless hours and headaches by doing the following:

- Monitoring competitors’ prices, locations and service offerings
- Harvesting directory and list data from the web, significantly improving your lead generation
- Acquiring customer and product marketing insight from forums, blogs and review sites
- Extracting website data for research and competitive analysis
- Social media scraping for trend and customer analysis
- Collecting regular or even real time updates of exchange rates, insurance rates, interest rates, -mortgage rates, real estate, stock prices and travel prices

It is a no-brainer, really. Businesses of all sizes are integrating data scraping into their business initiatives. Make sure you stay ahead of the competition by effectively data scraping.

Now for the hard part

The “why should you data scrape?” is the easy part. The “how” gets a bit more difficult. Are you savvy in Python and HTML? What about JavaScript and AJAX? Do you know how to utilize a proxy server? As your data collection grows, do you have the cloud-based infrastructure in place to handle the load? If you or someone at your organization can answer yes to these questions, do they have the time to take on all the web data scraping tasks? More importantly, is it a cost-effective use of your valuable staffing resources for them to do this? With constantly changing websites, resulting in broken code and websites automatically blacklisting your attempts, it could be more of a resource drain than anticipated.

Instead of focusing on all the issues above, business users should be concerned with essential questions such as:

- What data do I need to grow my business?
- Can I get the data I need, when I want it and in a format I can use?
- Can the data be easily stored for future analysis?
- Can I maximize my staffing resources and get this data without any programming knowledge or IT assistance?
- Can I start now?
- Can I cost-effectively collect the data needed to grow my business?

A web data scraping partner is standing by to help you!

This is where purchasing innovative web scraping services can be a game changer. The right partner can harness the value of the web for you. They will go into the weeds so you can spend your precious time growing your business.

Hold on a second! Before you run off to purchase data scraping services, you need to make sure you are looking for the solution that best fits your organisational needs. Don’t get overwhelmed. We know that relinquishing control of a critical business asset can be a little nerve-wracking. To help, we have come up with our steps and best practices for choosing the right data scraping company for your organisation.

1) Know Your Priorities

We have brought this up before, but when going through a purchasing decision process we like to turn to Project Management 101: The Project Management Triangle. For this example, we think a Euler diagram version of the triangle fits best.
Data Scraping and the Project Management Triangle

In this example, the constraints show up as Fast (time), Good (quality) and Cheap (cost). This diagram displays the interconnection of all three elements of the project. When using this diagram, you are only able to pick two priorities. Only two elements may change at the expense of the third:

- We can do the project quickly with high quality, but it will be costly
- We can do the project quickly at a reduced cost, but quality will suffer
- We can do a high-quality project at a reduced cost, but it will take much longer
Using this framework can help you shape your priorities and budget. This really, in turn, helps you search for and negotiate with a data scraping company.

2) Know your budget/resources.

This one is so important it is on here twice. Knowing your budget and staffing resources before reaching out to data scraping companies is key. This will make your search much more efficient and help you manage the entire process.

3) Have a plan going in.

Once again, you should know your priorities, budget, business objectives and have a high-level data scraping plan before choosing a data scraping company. Here are a few plan guidelines to get you started:

- Know what data points to collect: contact information, demographics, prices, dates, etc.
- Determine where the data points can most likely be found on the internet: your social media and review sites, your competitors’ sites, chambers of commerce and government sites, e-commerce sites your products/competitors’ products are sold, etc.
- What frequency do you need this data and what is the best way to receive it? Make sure you can get the data you need and in the correct format. Determine whether you can perform a full upload each time or just the changes from the previous dataset. Think about whether you want the data delivered via email, direct download or automatically to your Amazon S3 account.
- Who should have access to the data and how will it be stored once it is harvested?
- Finally, the plan should include what you are going to do with all this newly acquired data and who is receiving the final analysis.

4) Be willing to change your plan.

This one may seem counterintuitive after so much focus on having a game plan. However, remember to be flexible. The whole point of hiring experts is that they are the experts. A plan will make discussions much more productive, but the experts will probably offer insight you hadn’t thought of. Be willing to integrate their advice into your plan.

5) Have a list of questions ready for the company.

Having a list of questions ready for the data scraping company will help keep you in charge of the discussions and negotiations. Here are some points that you should know before choosing a data scraping partner:
- Can they start helping you immediately? Make sure they have the infrastructure and staff to get - you off the ground in a matter of weeks, not months.
- Make sure you can access them via email and phone. Also make sure you have access to those -actually performing the data scraping, not just a call center.
- Can they tailor their processes to fit with your requirements and organisational systems?
- Can they scrape more than plain text? Make sure they can harvest complex and dynamic sites -with JavaScript and AJAX. If a website’s content can be viewed on a browser, they should be-- able to get it for you.
- Make sure they have monitoring systems in place that can detect changes, breakdowns, and -quality issues. This will ensure you have access to a persistent and reliable flow of data, even - when the targeted websites change formats.
- As your data grows, can they easily keep up? Make sure they have scalable solutions that could - handle all that unstructured web data.
- Will they protect your company? Make sure they know discretion is important and that they will not advertise you as a client unless you give permission. Also, check to see how they disguise their scrapers so that the data harvesting cannot be traced back to your business.

6) Check their reviews.

Do a bit of your own manual data scraping to see what others business are saying about the companies you are researching.

7) Make sure the plan the company offers is cost-effective.

Here are a few questions to ask to make sure you get a full view of the costs and fees in the estimate:
- Is there a setup fee?
- What are the fixed costs associated with this project?
- What are the variable costs and how are they calculated?
- Are there any other taxes, fees or things that I could be charged for that are not listed on this -quote?
- What are the payment terms?

Source Url :-http://www.data-scraping.com.au/data-scraping-doesnt-have-to-be-hard/

Data Extraction/ Web Scraping Services

Making an informed business decision requires extracting, harvesting and exploiting information from diverse sources. Data extraction or web scraping (also known as web harvesting) is the process of mining information from websites using software, substantiated with human intelligence. The content 'scraped' from web sources using algorithms is stored in a structured format, so that it can be manually analyzed later.

Case in Point: How do price comparison websites acquire their pricing data? It is mostly by 'scraping' the information from online retailer websites.

We offers data extraction / web scraping services for retrieving data for advanced data processing or archiving from a variety of online sources and medium. Nonetheless, data extraction is a time consuming process, and if not conducted meticulously, it can result in loads of errors. A leading web scraping company, we can deliver required information within a short turnaround time, employing an extensive array of online sources.

Our Process Of Data Extraction/ Web Scraping, Involves:

- Capturing relevant data from the web, which is raw and unstructured
- Reviewing and refining the obtained data sets
- Formatting the data, consistent with the requirements of the client
- Organizing website and email lists, and contact details in an excel sheet
- Collating and summarizing the information, if required

Our professionals are adept at extracting data pertaining to your competition, their pricing strategy, gathering information about various product launches, their new and innovative features, etc., for enterprises, market research companies or price comparison websites through professional market research and subject matter blogs.

Our key Services in Web Scraping/ Database Extraction include:

We offer a comprehensive range of data extraction and scraping services right from Screen Scraping, Webpage / HTML Page Scraping, Semantic / Syntactic Scraping, Email Scraping to Database Extraction, PDF Data Extraction Services, etc.

- Extracting meta data from websites, blogs, and forums, etc.
- Data scraping from social media sites
- Data quarrying for online news and media sites from different online news and PR sources
- Data scraping from business directories and portals
- Data scraping pertaining to legal / medical / academic research
- Data scraping from real estate, hotels & restaurant, financial websites, etc.

Contact us to outsource your Data Scraping / Web Extraction Services or to-  learn more about our other data related services.

Source Url :-http://www.data-entry-india.com/data-extraction-web-scraping-services.html

Website Data Scraping Services

To help you in creating information databases, business portals and mailing lists, we provide efficient and accurate website data scraping services. We have been serving many worldwide clients for their specific requirements and delivering them structured data after collecting from World Wide Web. Our capabilities allow us to scrape data from an assortment of sources including websites, blogs, podcasts, and online directories etc.

 We have a team of skilled and experienced web scraping professionals who can deliver you results in the file format you needed such as Excel, CSV, Access, TXT and My SQL. We have expertise in automated as well as manual data scraping that ensure one hundred percent accuracy in the outcome. Our web data scraping professionals not only help you in gathering high-value data from the internet but also enable you to improve strategic insights and create new business opportunities.

What our website data scraping services include?

We provide a wide range of website data scraping services including data collection, data extraction, screen scraping and web data scraping. With its web scraping services, Data Outsourcing India helps you to crawl thousands of websites and gather useful information or data flawlessly. Using our web data scraping service, we can extract phone numbers, email addresses, reviews, ratings, business addresses, product details, contact information (name, title, department, company, country, city, state, etc.) and other business related data from following sources:

- Market place portals
- Auction portals
- Business directories
- Government online databases
- Statistics data from websites
- Social networking sites
- Online shopping portals
- Job portals
- Classifieds websites
- Hotels and restaurant portals
- News portals

Why outsource website data scraping services to us?

Our web data extraction experts have in-depth knowledge for screen scraping processes and it enables us to extract essential information from any online portal or database. If you outsource website data scraping to us, we assure you about accurate collection of information in easy to retrieval format. Here are some key benefits you gain with us:

- Tailor made processes to suit any kind of need
- Strict security and confidentiality policies
- A rigorous Quality Control (QC) process
- Leverage an optimum mix of techniques and technology
- Almost 60-65% savings on operational cost
- You get you project completed in industry’s best TAT
- Round-the-clock customer support
- Access to a dedicated team of website data scraping professionals

 With our quick, accurate and affordable web scraping services, we are helping worldwide large as well as medium size companies. Our clients are from different industries- including real estate, healthcare, banking, finance, insurance, automobiles, marketing, academics, human resources, ecommerce, manufacturing, travel, hotels and more. The-  multifaceted experience facilitates us in delivering every online data scraping project with ZERO error rates.

Source Url:-http://www.dataoutsourcingindia.com/website-data-scraping-services.html

The Ultimate Guide to Web Data Extraction

The Ultimate Guide to Web Data Extraction

Web data extraction (also known as web scraping, web harvesting, screen scraping, etc.) is a technique for extracting huge amounts of data from websites on the internet. The data available on websites is generally not available to download easily and can only be accessed by using a web browser. However, web is the largest repository of open data and this data has been growing at exponential rates since the inception of internet.

The Ultimate Guide to web data extraction

Web data is of great use to Ecommerce portals, media companies, research firms, data scientists, government and can even help the healthcare industry with ongoing research and making predictions on the spread of diseases.

Consider the data available on classifieds sites, real estate portals, social networks, retail sites, and online shopping websites etc. being easily available in a structured format, ready to be analyzed. Most of these sites don’t provide the functionality to save their data to a local or cloud storage. Some sites provide APIs, but they typically come with restrictions and aren’t reliable enough. Although it’s technically possible to copy and paste data from a website to your local storage, this is inconvenient and out of question when it comes to practical use cases for businesses.

Web scraping helps you do this in an automated fashion and does it far more efficiently and accurately. A web scraping setup interacts with websites in a way similar to a web browser, but instead of displaying it on a screen, it saves the data to a storage system.
Applications of web data extraction

1. Pricing intelligence

Pricing intelligence is an application that’s gaining popularity by each passing day given the tightening of competition in the online space. E-commerce portals are always watching out for their competitors using web crawling to have real time pricing data from them and to fine tune their own catalogs with competitive pricing. This is done by deploying web crawlers that are programmed to pull product details like product name, price, variant and so on. This data is plugged into an automated system that assigns ideal prices for every product after analyzing the competitors’ prices.

Pricing intelligence is also used in cases where there is a need for consistency in pricing across different versions of the same portal. The capability of web crawling techniques to extract prices in real time makes such applications a reality.

2. Cataloging

Ecommerce portals typically have a huge number of product listings. It’s not easy to update and maintain such a big catalog. This is why many companies depend on web date extractions services for gathering data required to update their catalogs. This helps them discover new categories they haven’t been aware of or update existing catalogs with new product descriptions, images or videos.

3. Market research

Market research is incomplete unless the amount of data at your disposal is huge. Given the limitations of traditional methods of data acquisition and considering the volume of relevant data available on the web, web data extraction is by far the easiest way to gather data required for market research. The shift of businesses from brick and mortar stores to online spaces has also made web data a better resource for market research.

4. Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis requires data extracted from websites where people share their reviews, opinions or complaints about services, products, movies, music or any other consumer focused offering. Extracting this user generated content would be the first step in any sentiment analysis project and web scraping serves the purpose efficiently.

5. Competitor analysis

The possibility of monitoring competition was never this accessible until web scraping technologies came along. By deploying web spiders, it’s now easy to closely monitor the activities of your competitors like the promotions they’re running, social media activity, marketing strategies, press releases, catalogs etc. in order to have the upper hand in competition. Near real time crawls take it a level further and provides businesses with real time competitor data.

6. Content aggregation

Media websites need instant access to breaking news and other trending information on the web on a continuous basis. Being quick at reporting news is a deal breaker for these companies. Web crawling makes it possible to monitor or extract data from popular news portals, forums or similar sites for trending topics or keywords that you want to monitor. Low latency web crawling is used for this use case as the update speed should be very high.

7. Brand monitoring

Every brand now understands the importance of customer focus for business growth. It would be in their best interests to have a clean reputation for their brand if they want to survive in this competitive market. Most companies are now using web crawling solutions to monitor popular forums, reviews on ecommerce sites and social media platforms for mentions of their brand and product names. This in turn can help them stay updated to the voice of the customer and fix issues that could ruin brand reputation at the earliest. There’s no doubt about a customer-focused business going up in the growth graph.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/ultimate-web-data-extraction-guide

Benefits of Acquiring Web Data Scrapper in Business

Benefits of Acquiring Web Data Scrapper in Business

Data is the most important thing required in today's marketing world. The data harvested can be utilized for multiple purposes in the world of marketing by numerous people. It is believed that the amount of data you have makes you stronger in the market against your competitors.

The only restriction in this process is how to get data from internet or how to extract data from website? To culminate this barrier of yours there are plenty of data scrapping devices available in this category. Well more than devices there are companies that provide data extracting services to fulfill user's requirement.

In these two extractors devices are far more reliable and self operative than organizations. There are plenty of benefits that a web data extractor provides in comparison to organizations. With data extractors you have the freedom to choose the topic of your own and get data from the websites. Were in an outsourcing they will provide you one thing at a time for which you will have to pursue again & again.

Numerous organizations have opted for the web data scrapper to discover specific information according to their requirement for instance. Site pages are fabricated utilizing content based imprint up dialects (HTML and XHTML), and much of the time contain an abundance of valuable information in content structure. Be that as it may, most site pages are intended for human end-clients and not for simplicity of mechanized use. In light of this, tool that rub web substance were made. A web scrapper is an API to concentrate information from a site.

Regularly, information exchange between projects is expert utilizing data structures suited for computerized handling by PCs, not individuals. Such exchange arrangements and conventions are normally inflexibly organized; all around recorded, effectively parsed, and keep vagueness to a base. All the time, these transmissions are not comprehensible by any stretch of the imagination. That is the reason the key component that recognizes information scratching from standard parsing is that the yield being scratched was expected for showcase to an end-client.

In all aspects data scrapping is better to be done by a tool rather than taking assistance of an organization.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/products-articles/benefits-acquiring-web-data-scrapper-business-1477753.html#ixzz4hnBWRp2z

The Manifold Advantages Of Investing In An Efficient Web Scraping Service

The Manifold Advantages Of Investing In An Efficient Web Scraping Service

Data Scraping Services is an extremely professional and effective online data mining service that would enable you to combine content from several webpages in a very quick and convenient method and deliver the content in any structure you may desire in the most accurate manner. Web scraping may be referred as web harvesting or data scraping a website and is the special method of extracting and assembling details from various websites with the help from web scraping tool along with web scraping software. It is also connected to web indexing that indexes details on the online web scraper utilizing bot (web scraping tool).

The dissimilarity is that web scraping is actually focused on obtaining unstructured details from diverse resources into a planned arrangement that can be utilized and saved, for instance a database or worksheet. Frequent services that utilize online web scraper are price-comparison sites or diverse kinds of mash-up websites. The most fundamental method for obtaining details from diverse resources is individual copy-paste. Nevertheless, the objective with Data Scraping Services is to create an effective web scraping software to the last element. Other methods comprise DOM parsing, upright aggregation platforms and even HTML parses. Web scraping might be in opposition to the conditions of usage of some sites. The enforceability of the terms is uncertain.

While complete replication of original content will in numerous cases is prohibited, in the United States, court ruled in Feist Publications v Rural Telephone Service that replication details is permissible. Bitrate service allows you to obtain specific details from the net without technical information; you just need to send the explanation of your explicit requirements by email and Bitrate will set everything up for you. The latest self-service is formatted through your preferred web browser and formation needs only necessary facts of either Ruby or Javascript. The main constituent of this web scraping tool is a thoughtfully made crawler that is very quick and simple to arrange. The web scraping software permits the users to identify domains, crawling tempo, filters and preparation making it extremely flexible. Every web page brought by the crawler is effectively processed by a draft that is accountable for extracting and arranging the essential content. Data scraping a website is configured with UI, and in the full-featured package this will be easily completed by Data Scraping. However, Data Scraping has two vital capabilities, which are:

- Data mining from sites to a planned custom-format (web scraping tool)

- Real-time assessment details on the internet.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/products-articles/manifold-advantages-investing-efficient-web-scraping-service-668690.html#ixzz4hDqL4EFk

Web Extraction – Extracting Web Data

Web Extraction – Extracting Web Data

Web extraction is a complex process of extracting web pages which often takes more time than expected, depending on quantity and quality of data to be extracted. Web grabber and web extractors are designed to locate URL's, crawl, web pages, contents, compare relevancy and than extract HTML-based data to MS Excel, CSV, XML, database or any text format.

Employing web extraction techniques, services and tools help capture large volume of valuable information from un-structured resources, databases quickly regardless of time and place and it could be stored in different formats which in turns analyzed by intellectuals and used to meet day to day business challenges.

Corporate Houses and Business Often Employ or Outsource Web Extraction Projects to Companies to Get Access of Desired Data For Purposes Like:

• Web extraction for competitive analysis
• Website extraction
• Web extraction for sales legal generation
• Data extraction for web automation
• Web extraction for business intelligence
• E commerce web data extraction
• Extract images and files
• Extracted data in the required format
• Social media website, data extraction
• Collecting reviews on product and services
• Business process re-engineering
• Gathering a large amount of structured data
• Web 2.0 data extraction
• Online Social Network users detail, behavior extraction
• Extracting data to analyzing human behavior

Web extraction provides scalable online marketing intelligence to business. Outsourcing professional web extractors help get end-to-end business data solutions with in a matter of few hours. Accuracy and reliability of data extracted by professionals is on higher side compared to automation tools only.

Source:http://dataextractionservicesindia.blogspot.in/2013/03/web-extraction-extracting-web-data.html

Know about what is screen scraping!

Know about what is screen scraping!

In present scenario, world is becoming hugely competitive. Business owners always look excited to get benefits as well as best results. They are eager to grow their business hugely as well as effective manner. Currently, majority of businessmen are available online. There are several industries that are available over the web today and trying to make effective promotion of their products as well as services with the support of their particular websites. Majority of people are now using internet services for several purposes. People use online facilities to get contact details of other users. More to the point, businessmen usually look excited to get software that can make them able to get the preferred data in an instant manner. In this case, screen scraping tool will be the best option among all. At present, there are a number of people who are excited to know that What Is Screen Scraping . As far as screen scrapping is concerned, it is a process that makes you able to extract huge data from website in a very little time.

There would be really no other best option instead of screen scraping software when it comes to mining huge amount of data from websites in a very short time. This specific program is getting huge attention of the people nowadays. This program is extremely capable to extract huge amount of data from websites in a matter of seconds. It has helped business professionals a lot in terms of growing their popularity and benefit both. With the support of this program, one can easily extract relevant data in a hassle-free manner. Not only this, this software can also easily drag out large files from the websites. Moreover, this software is also capable to drag images from some particular website with so much ease.

This software can not only be used for the purpose of extracting data from websites but also you can submit and fill forms with its support. There is need of too much time when it comes to filling or copying the data manually. This software is now a renowned as well as one of the fastest means of extracting data from websites. This software not only helpful in simplifying data extraction process but also helps websites to become friendlier for the users. To know more about what is screen scrapping, one can also take help of internet facility to fulfill their purpose.

Source:http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/6086054?articleid=6086054

Web Scraping: Top 15 Ways To Use It For Business.

Web Scraping: Top 15 Ways To Use It For Business.

Web Scraping also commonly known as Web Data extraction / Web Harvesting / Screen Scrapping is a technology which is loved by startups, small and big companies. In simple words it is actually an automation technique to extract the unorganized web data into manageable format, where the data is extracted by traversing each URL by the robot and then using REGEX, CSS, XPATH or some other technique to extract the desired information in choice of output format.

So, it's a process of collecting information automatically from the World Wide Web. Current web scraping solutions range from the ad-hoc, requiring human effort, to even fully automated systems that are able to convert entire web sites into structured information. Using Web Scraper you can build sitemaps that will navigate the site and extract the data. Using different type of selectors the Web Scraper will navigate the site and extract multiple types of data - text, tables, images, links and more.

Here are 20 ways to use web scraping in your business.

 1. Scrape products & price for comparison site – The site specific web crawling websites or the price comparison websites crawl the stores website prices, product description and images to get the data for analytic, affiliation or comparison.  It has also been proved that pricing optimization techniques can improve gross profit margins by almost 10%. Selling products at a competitive rate all the time is a really crucial aspect of e-commerce. Web crawling is also used by travel, e-commerce companies to extract prices from airlines’ websites in real time since a long time. By creating your custom scraping agent you can extract product feeds, images, price and other all associated details regarding the product from multiple sites and create your own data-ware house or price comparison site. For example trivago.com

2. Online presence can be tracked- That’s also an important aspect of web scraping where business profiles and reviews on the websites can be scrapped. This can be used to see the performance of the product, the user behavior and reaction. The web scraping could list and check thousands of the user profiles and the reviews which can be really useful for the business analytics.

3. Custom Analysis and curation- This one is basically for the new websites/ channels wherein the scrapped data can be helpful for the channels in knowing the viewer behavior. This is done with the goal of providing targeted news to the audience. Thus what you watch online gives the behavioral pattern to the website so they know their audience and offer what actually the audience like.

4. Online Reputation - In this world of digitalization companies are bullish about the spent on the online reputation management. Thus the web scrapping is essential here as well. When you plan your ORM strategy the scrapped data helps you to understand which audiences you most hope to impact and what areas of liability can most open your brand up to reputation damage. The web crawler could reveal opinion leaders, trending topics and demographic facts like gender, age group, GEO location, and sentiment in text. By understanding these areas of vulnerability, you can use them to your greatest advantage.

5. Detect fraudulent reviews - It has become a common practice for people to read online opinions and reviews for different purposes. Thus it’s important to figure out the Opinion Spamming: It refers to "illegal" activities example writing fake reviews on the portals. It is also called shilling, which tries to mislead readers. Thus the web scrapping can be helpful crawling the reviews and detecting which one to block, to be verified, or streamline the experience.

6. To provide better targeted ads to your customers- The scrapping not only gives you numbers but also the sentiments and behavioral analytic thus you know the audience types and the choice of ads they would want to see.

7. Business specific scrapping – Taking doctors for example: you can scrape health physicians or doctors from their clinic websites to provide a catalog of available doctors as per specialization and region or any other specification.
  
8. To gather public opinion- Monitor specific company pages from social networks to gather updates for what people are saying about certain companies and their products. Data collection is always useful for the product’s growth.
  
9. Search engine results for SEO tracking- By scraping organic search results you can quickly find out your SEO competitors for a particular search term. You can determine the title tags and the keywords they are targeting. Thus you get an idea of which keywords are driving traffic to a website, which content categories are attracting links and user engagement, what kind of resources will it take to rank your site.

10. Price competitiveness- It tracks the stock availability and prices of products in one of the most frequent ways and sends notifications whenever there is a change in competitors' prices or   in the market. In ecommerce, Retailers or marketplaces use web scraping not only to monitor their competitor prices but also to improve their product attributes.  To stay on top of their direct competitors, nowadays e-commerce sites have started closely monitoring their counterparts. For example, say Amazon would want to know how their products are performing against Flipkart or Walmart, and whether their product coverage is complete. Towards this end, they would want to crawl product catalogs from these two sites to find the gaps in their catalog. They’d also want to stay updated about whether they’re running any promotions on any of the products or categories. This helps in gaining actionable insights that can be implemented in their own pricing decisions. Apart from promotions, sites are also interested in finding out details such as shipping times, number of sellers, availability, similar products (recommendations) etc. for identical products.

11. Scrape leads- This is another important use for the sales driven organization wherein lead generation is done. Sales teams are always hungry for data and with the help of the web scrapping technique you can scrap leads from directories such as Yelp, Sulekha, Just Dial, Yellow Pages etc. and then contact them to make a sales introduction. To crapes complete information about the business profile, address, email, phone, products/services, working hours, Geo codes, etc. The data can be taken out in the desired format and can be used for lead generation, brand building or other purposes..
 
12. For events organization – You can scrape events from thousands of event websites in the US to create an application that consolidates all of the events together.

13. Job scraping sites : Job sites are also using scrapping to list all the data in one place. They scrape different company websites or jobs sites to create a central job board website and have a list of companies that are currently hiring to contact. There is also a method to use Google with LinkedIn to get lists of people by company which are geo-targeted by this data.  The only thing that was difficult was to extract from the professional social networking site is contact details,  although now they are readily available through other sources by writing scraping scripts methods to collate this data. For example naukri.com

14. Online reputation management : Do you know 50% of consumers read reviews before deciding to book a hotel. Now scrape review, ratings and comments from multiple websites to understand the customer sentiments and analyze with your favorite tool.

15. To build vertical specific search engines- This is new thing popular in the market but again for this a lot of data is needed hence web scrapping is done for as much public data as possible because this volume of data is practically impossible to gather.

Web scraping can be used to power up the following businesses like Social media monitoring Travel sites, Lead generation, E-commerce, Events listings, Price comparison, Finance, Reputation monitoring and the list is never ending
Each business has competition in the present world, so companies scrape their competitor information regularly to monitor the movements. In the era of big data, applications of web scraping is endless. Depending on your business, you can find a lot of area where web data can be of great use.  Web scraping is thus an art which is use to make data gathering automated and fast.

Source:https://www.datascraping.co/doc/articles/86/businesses-use-of-web-scraping

What is Web Scraping Services ?

What is Web Scraping Services ?

Web scraping is essentially a service where an algorithm driven process fetches relevant data from the depths of the internet and stores it on a centralized location (think excel sheets) which can be analyzed to draw meaningful and strategic insight.

To put things into perspective, imagine the internet as a large tank cluttered with trillions of tons of data. Now, imagine instructing something as small as a spider to go and fetch all data relevant to your business. The spider works in accordance with the instructions and starts digging deep into the tank, fetching data with an objective orientation, requesting for data wherever it is protected by a keeper and being a small spider, it fetches data even from the most granular nook and corner of the tank. Now, this spider has a briefcase where it stores all collected data in a systematic manner and returns to you after its exploration into the deep internet tank. What you have now is perfectly the data you need in a perfectly understandable format. This is exactly what a web scraping service entails except the fact that it also promises working on those briefcase data and cleaning it up for redundancies and errors and presents it to you in the form of a well consumption-ready information format and not raw unprocessed data.

Now, there is a high possibility that you may be wondering how else can you utilize this data to extract the best RoI- Return on Investment.

Here's just a handful of the most popular beneficial uses of web scraping services-

Competition Analysis

The best part about having aggressive competitors is that you just by alert monitoring of their activities, you can outpace them by enhancing off of their big move. The industries are growing rapidly, only the informed are ahead of the race.

Data Cumulation

Web scraping ensures aggregating of all data in a centralized location. Say goodbye to the cumbersome process of collecting bits and pieces of raw data and spending the night trying to make sense out of it.

Supply-chain Monitoring

While decentralization is good, the boss needs to do what a boss does- hold the reins. Track your distributors who blatantly ignore your list prices and web miscreants who are out with a mission to destroy your brand. It’s time to take charge.

Pricing Strategy

Pricing is of the most crucial aspect in the product mix and your business model- you get only one chance to make it or break it. Stay ahead of the incumbents by monitoring their pricing strategy and make the final cut to stay ahead of time.

Delta Analytics

The top tip to stay ahead in the game is to keep all your senses open to receive any change. Stay updated about everything happening around your sphere of interest and stay ahead by planning and responding to prospective changes.

Market Understanding

Understand your market well. Web scraping as a service offers you the information you need to be abreast of the continuous evolution of your market, your competitors’ responses and the dynamic preferences of your customer.

Lead Generation

We all know that a customer is the sole reason for the existence of a product or business. Lead generation is the first step to acquiring a customer. The simple equation is that more the number of leads, higher is the aggregate conversion of customers. Web scraping as a service entails receiving and creating a relevant – relevant is the key word – relevant lead generation. It is always better to target someone who is interested or needs to avail the services or product you offer.

Data Enhancement

With web extraction services, you can extract more juice out of the data you have. The ready to consume format of information that web scraping services offer allows you to match it with other relevant data points to connect the dots and draw insights for the bigger picture.

Review Analysis

Continuous improvement is the key to building a successful brand and consumer feedback is of the prime sources that will let you know where you stand in terms of the goal – customer satisfaction. Web scraping services offer a segue to understanding your customers’ review and help you stay ahead of the game by improvising.

Financial Intelligence

In the dynamic industry of finance and ever-volatile investment industry, know what’s the best use of your money. After all, the whole drama is for the money. Web scraping services offer you the benefit of using alternative data to plan your finances much more efficiently.

Research Process

The information derived from a web scraping process is almost ready to be run through for a research and analysis function. Focus on the research instead of data collection and management.

Risk & Regulations Compliance

Understanding risk and evolving regulations is important to avoid any market or legal trap. Stay updated with the evolving dynamics of the regulatory framework and the possible risks that mean significantly for your business.

Botscraper ensures that all your web scraping process is done with utmost diligence and efficiency. We at Botscraper have a single aim -  your success and we know exactly what to deliver to ensure that.

Source:http://www.botscraper.com/blog/What-is-web-scraping-service-

Scrape Data from Website is a Proven Way to Boost Business Profits

Data scraping is not a new technology in market. Several business persons use this method to get benefited from it and to make good fortune. It is the procedure of gathering worthwhile data that has been located in the public domain of the internet and keeping it in records or databases for future usage in innumerable applications.

There is a large amount of data available only through websites. However, as many people have found out, trying to copy data into a usable database or spreadsheet directly out of a website can be a tiring process. Manual copying and pasting of data from web pages is shear wastage of time and effort. To make this task easier there are a number of companies that offer commercial applications specifically intended to scrape data from website. They are proficient of navigating the web, evaluating the contents of a site, and then dragging data points and placing them into an organized, operational databank or worksheet.

Web scraping company

Every day, there are numerous websites that are hosting in internet. It is almost impossible to see all the websites in a single day. With this scraping tool, companies are able to view all the web pages in internet. If a business is using an extensive collection of applications, these scraping tools prove to be very useful.

It is most often done either to interface to a legacy system which has no other mechanism which is compatible with current hardware, or to interface to a third-party system which does not provide a more convenient API. In the second case, the operator of the third-party system will often see screen scraping as unwanted, due to reasons such as increased system load, the loss of advertisement revenue, or the loss of control of the information content.

Scrape data from website greatly helps in determining the modern market trends, customer behavior and the future trends and gathers relevant data that is immensely desirable for the business or personal use.


Source : http://www.botscraper.com/blog/Scrape-Data-from-Website-is-a-Proven-Way-to-Boost-Business-Profits

Web Data Extraction Services Derive Data from Huge Sources of Information

Web Data Extraction Services Derive Data from Huge Sources of Information

Statistics show that the number of websites exceeded 1 billion and will exceed this figure by 2016. Even considering that only 25% are active the number is staggering. In this there are thousands of categories dedicated to virtually all subjects under the Sun. For people who want information the internet is a boon because they can get the latest data and detailed information on the topic of their interest. Anyone who does not know how complex the web is would think that a simple Google search is all they need to get their hands on information. It is only when they actually do it that they realize how frustrating it is to actually get to sites that contain genuine information and not promotional materials.

Out there people have access to not just gigabytes of data but terabytes out of which data that serves their purpose may only be in megabytes but to get to this it requires accessing not one but thousands of websites and extracting data. The task is easy for web data extraction services since keywords and a few other parameters and the software do they use automated web data extraction software. The operator simply inputs filters, defines es the rest. The software will carry out automatic searches based on inputs and will access thousands of sites and voluminous amounts of data. From this huge mountain of data it extracts only the specific bits of information required by the end user. The rest is discarded.

How is this advantageous to the end user?

In the normal course the end user if left to extract web data on his own would not have the time or patience to visit hundreds or thousands of websites. It would take more than a couple of months. Even assuming he did visit websites, he would be up against blocks put up by the administrators that would prevent him from accessing or downloading the data. Third, even if he did manage to obtain information, he would have to refine it-a painstaking and time consuming task. All these headaches are short-circuited by the use of web data extraction software. He sits back, carries on with his usual work and the information he seeks is delivered to him by the web extraction service. The extraction tool they use accesses thousands of sites, even password protected sites and sites with automatic blocks against repeated attempts. Since it is automated it can access one website after another in quick succession and download data in the multi-threaded mode. It will run unattended for hours and days, all the while sifting through terabytes of data and exporting refined data into a predefined format. An end user gets more meaningful data he can work on immediately and be even more productive.

If web data extraction services are popular and accepted it is only because they deliver meaningful data. They can only do this if they have the tools to access the huge number of websites, ferret out the data from the voluminous mass and present it all in a usable format, all of which is easy when they use the extractor tool.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/technology-articles/software-articles/web-data-extraction-services-derive-data-huge-sources-information-1417142.html

Some Of The Most Reason Product Data scraping Services

Some Of The Most Reason Product Data scraping Services

There are literally around the world that is relatively easy to use thousands of free proxy servers. But the trick is finding them. There are hundreds of servers in multiple sites, but to find, and is compatible with a variety of protocols, persistence, testing, trial and error is a lesson that can be. But if you work behind the scenes of the audience will find a pool, there are risks involved in its use.

First, you do not know what activities are going on the server or elsewhere on the server. Sensitive data sent through a public proxy or the request is a bad idea. After performing a simple search on Google, the scraping of the anonymous proxy server provides enterprises gegevens.kon quickly found. Some are beginning to extract information from PDF. It is often called PDF scraping, scraping as the process has just obtained the information contained in PDF files.

It has never been done? The business and use the patented scraping a patent search. Select the U.S. Patent Office was opened an inventor in the United States is the best product on the database and displays all media in their mouths. The question is: Can I do a patent search to see if my invention ahead of time and money to promote their intellectual property?

When viewed in a Web patents may apply to be a very difficult process. For example, "dog" and "food" the study database after the 5745 patents in the study. Cookies and may take some time! Patents, more than the number of results from the database search results. Enter the picture. Download and see pictures from the Internet while on the Internet, and can be used as the database server as well as their own research.

A patent application takes a long time, many companies and organizations looking for ways to improve the process. A number of organizations and companies, whose sole purpose is for them to do a patent search to recruit workers. Burdens on small companies specializing in contract research and other patents. of modern technology to conduct research in a patent called the pod.

Since the script will automatically look for patents held, and accurate information to employees, can play an important role in the scrape of the patent! Give beer techniques can remove the picture from the message.

Put a face in the real world; let's look at the pharmaceutical industry. Enter the number of the next big drug companies. The Met will use this information, or the company can be in front, heavy, or rotate in the opposite direction. It would be too expensive for one day to do a patent search for a team of researchers is dedicated to maintaining. Patent technology to meet the ideas and techniques that came before the media.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/business-articles/some-most-reason-product-data-scraping-services-972602.html

Web Data Extraction

Web Data Extraction

The Internet as we know today is a repository of information that can be accessed across geographical societies. In just over two decades, the Web has moved from a university curiosity to a fundamental research, marketing and communications vehicle that impinges upon the everyday life of most people in all over the world. It is accessed by over 16% of the population of the world spanning over 233 countries.

As the amount of information on the Web grows, that information becomes ever harder to keep track of and use. Compounding the matter is this information is spread over billions of Web pages, each with its own independent structure and format. So how do you find the information you're looking for in a useful format - and do it quickly and easily without breaking the bank?

Search Isn't Enough

Search engines are a big help, but they can do only part of the work, and they are hard-pressed to keep up with daily changes. For all the power of Google and its kin, all that search engines can do is locate information and point to it. They go only two or three levels deep into a Web site to find information and then return URLs. Search Engines cannot retrieve information from deep-web, information that is available only after filling in some sort of registration form and logging, and store it in a desirable format. In order to save the information in a desirable format or a particular application, after using the search engine to locate data, you still have to do the following tasks to capture the information you need:

· Scan the content until you find the information.

· Mark the information (usually by highlighting with a mouse).

· Switch to another application (such as a spreadsheet, database or word processor).

· Paste the information into that application.

Its not all copy and paste

Consider the scenario of a company is looking to build up an email marketing list of over 100,000 thousand names and email addresses from a public group. It will take up over 28 man-hours if the person manages to copy and paste the Name and Email in 1 second, translating to over $500 in wages only, not to mention the other costs associated with it. Time involved in copying a record is directly proportion to the number of fields of data that has to copy/pasted.

Is there any Alternative to copy-paste?

A better solution, especially for companies that are aiming to exploit a broad swath of data about markets or competitors available on the Internet, lies with usage of custom Web harvesting software and tools.

Web harvesting software automatically extracts information from the Web and picks up where search engines leave off, doing the work the search engine can't. Extraction tools automate the reading, the copying and pasting necessary to collect information for further use. The software mimics the human interaction with the website and gathers data in a manner as if the website is being browsed. Web Harvesting software only navigate the website to locate, filter and copy the required data at much higher speeds that is humanly possible. Advanced software even able to browse the website and gather data silently without leaving the footprints of access.

Source : http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction&id=575212

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Data-Mining---How-Does-it-Help-Businesses?&id=3860679

Things to know about web scraping

Things to know about web scraping

First things first, it is important to understand what web scraping means and what is its purpose. Web scraping is a computer software technique through which people can extract information and content from various websites. The main purpose is to use that information in a way that the site owner does not have direct control over it. Most people use web scraping in order to turn commercial advantage of their competitors into their own.

There are many scraping tools available on the Internet, but because some people might think that web scraping goes long beyond their duties, many small companies that provide this type of services have appeared on the market. This way, you can turn this challenging and complex process into an easy web scraping one, which, believe it or not, exists for nearly as long as the web. All you have to do is some quick research on the Internet and find the best consultant that is willing to help you with this matter. When it comes to the industries that web scraping is targeting, it is worth mentioning that some of them prevail over others. One good example is digital publishers and directories. They are one of the easiest targets for web scrappers, because most of their intellectual property is available to a large number of people. Industries like travel or real estate are also a good place for scraping, along with ecommerce, which is an obvious target too. Time-limited promotions and even flash sales are the reasons why ecommerce is seen as a candy by web scrapers.

Source: http://www.amazines.com/article_detail.cfm/6196289?articleid=6196289

Data Mining Basics

Data Mining Basics

Definition and Purpose of Data Mining:

Data mining is a relatively new term that refers to the process by which predictive patterns are extracted from information.

Data is often stored in large, relational databases and the amount of information stored can be substantial. But what does this data mean? How can a company or organization figure out patterns that are critical to its performance and then take action based on these patterns? To manually wade through the information stored in a large database and then figure out what is important to your organization can be next to impossible.

This is where data mining techniques come to the rescue! Data mining software analyzes huge quantities of data and then determines predictive patterns by examining relationships.

Data Mining Techniques:

There are numerous data mining (DM) techniques and the type of data being examined strongly influences the type of data mining technique used.

Note that the nature of data mining is constantly evolving and new DM techniques are being implemented all the time.

Generally speaking, there are several main techniques used by data mining software: clustering, classification, regression and association methods.

Clustering:

Clustering refers to the formation of data clusters that are grouped together by some sort of relationship that identifies that data as being similar. An example of this would be sales data that is clustered into specific markets.

Classification:

Data is grouped together by applying known structure to the data warehouse being examined. This method is great for categorical information and uses one or more algorithms such as decision tree learning, neural networks and "nearest neighbor" methods.

Regression:

Regression utilizes mathematical formulas and is superb for numerical information. It basically looks at the numerical data and then attempts to apply a formula that fits that data.

New data can then be plugged into the formula, which results in predictive analysis.

Association:

Often referred to as "association rule learning," this method is popular and entails the discovery of interesting relationships between variables in the data warehouse (where the data is stored for analysis). Once an association "rule" has been established, predictions can then be made and acted upon. An example of this is shopping: if people buy a particular item then there may be a high chance that they also buy another specific item (the store manager could then make sure these items are located near each other).

Data Mining and the Business Intelligence Stack:

Business intelligence refers to the gathering, storing and analyzing of data for the purpose of making intelligent business decisions. Business intelligence is commonly divided into several layers, all of which constitute the business intelligence "stack."

The BI (business intelligence) stack consists of: a data layer, analytics layer and presentation layer.

The analytics layer is responsible for data analysis and it is this layer where data mining occurs within the stack. Other elements that are part of the analytics layer are predictive analysis and KPI (key performance indicator) formation.

Data mining is a critical part of business intelligence, providing key relationships between groups of data that is then displayed to end users via data visualization (part of the BI stack's presentation layer). Individuals can then quickly view these relationships in a graphical manner and take some sort of action based on the data being displayed.

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Resume Extraction: To Grab Best Candidate

Resume Extraction: To Grab Best Candidate

Selecting the eligible and potential employee for the organization is the most significant task of any company. Success rate of any company totally depends on the assortment of talented and experienced candidates. Quality is of prime significance than quantity and for this, having the best resume analyzer is a good idea. The tasks related to recruitment should be performed well by the HR department.

Examination of a perfectly apt candidate is the main concern of the qualitative resume software. A number of myriad aspects are considered for the resume assessment. There posses a competition of various talents that candidate possesses. Before recruitment of any applicant, his job analysis is performed by the HR department. For this purpose performing resume extraction becomes essential and resume analyzer is the medium to do so.

Proficient software performs a helpful task at job portals. The resume analyzer parses all the resumes and filters them on the basis of presence of keyword. It facilitates to match the particular keyword with every available resume. Presence of keywords indicates that the candidate is short listed while absence refers rejection. As these days everyone needs fast results performing resume extraction becomes essential to save time and money.

Resume analyzer helps in accepting and rejecting the resume of the candidates. It position or rank the candidates in to a list, this criteria is based on the presence of the keywords and the required apt information about the candidate. Resume software implements the standard policies for formatting the process of resume extraction and uploads this important data into your available database. This data is available in the text format. Essential information like name, qualifications, contact details, certifications, last work experience etc present in resume is uploaded into the database.

This information is used to match the criteria of the required job post. Ranking of the candidates helps to opt for the most suitable and skilled candidate among the list of thousands.

Resume extraction is one of the essential aspects to sort out the potential candidate.

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Data Mining

Data Mining

Data mining is the retrieving of hidden information from data using algorithms. Data mining helps to extract useful information from great masses of data, which can be used for making practical interpretations for business decision-making. It is basically a technical and mathematical process that involves the use of software and specially designed programs. Data mining is thus also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) since it involves searching for implicit information in large databases. The main kinds of data mining software are: clustering and segmentation software, statistical analysis software, text analysis, mining and information retrieval software and visualization software.

Data mining is gaining a lot of importance because of its vast applicability. It is being used increasingly in business applications for understanding and then predicting valuable information, like customer buying behavior and buying trends, profiles of customers, industry analysis, etc. It is basically an extension of some statistical methods like regression. However, the use of some advanced technologies makes it a decision making tool as well. Some advanced data mining tools can perform database integration, automated model scoring, exporting models to other applications, business templates, incorporating financial information, computing target columns, and more.

Some of the main applications of data mining are in direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, healthcare, the oil and gas industry, scientific tests, genetics, telecommunications, financial services and utilities. The different kinds of data are: text mining, web mining, social networks data mining, relational databases, pictorial data mining, audio data mining and video data mining.

Some of the most popular data mining tools are: decision trees, information gain, probability, probability density functions, Gaussians, maximum likelihood estimation, Gaussian Baves classification, cross-validation, neural networks, instance-based learning /case-based/ memory-based/non-parametric, regression algorithms, Bayesian networks, Gaussian mixture models, K-Means and hierarchical clustering, Markov models, support vector machines, game tree search and alpha-beta search algorithms, game theory, artificial intelligence, A-star heuristic search, HillClimbing, simulated annealing and genetic algorithms.

Some popular data mining software includes: Connexor Machines, Copernic Summarizer, Corpora, DocMINER, DolphinSearch, dtSearch, DS Dataset, Enkata, Entrieva, Files Search Assistant, FreeText Software Technologies, Intellexer, Insightful InFact, Inxight, ISYS:desktop, Klarity (part of Intology tools), Leximancer, Lextek Onix Toolkit, Lextek Profiling Engine, Megaputer Text Analyst, Monarch, Recommind MindServer, SAS Text Miner, SPSS LexiQuest, SPSS Text Mining for Clementine, Temis-Group, TeSSI®, Textalyser, TextPipe Pro, TextQuest, Readware, Quenza, VantagePoint, VisualText(TM), by TextAI, Wordstat. There is also free software and shareware such as INTEXT, S-EM (Spy-EM), and Vivisimo/Clusty.

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