The internet is expanding more and more with each day. There are more than 4.1 billion internet users generating content via interactions and activities. Internet-influenced retail is expected to rise to around $3.45 trillion. Therefore, it is not a surprise that everyone wants their hands on web data. Because data drives the businesses, basing your decisions on it is what is making the big buck for the companies.
There could be a variety of ways to gather up all the data from the big ocean of the internet.
No matter how much data you have obtained, the web will always have more data to offer. There are many ways to gather up all of it, however, the best way to go about data collection is web scraping. It is the easiest and most cost-effective method assured to give you the data that you require. Check Oxylabs’ solutions for the best web data collection.
What is Web Scraping?
Also called web crawling and web data extraction, web scraping is the technique used to collect data from websites by using a tool or automated script that sends multiple requests to websites to gather and save the required data and store in an organized manner.
Web scraping can make use of a browser or HTTP request to request data from sites. The manual way of doing the same task without web scrapers could be extremely exhausting of time and resources.
Why Are Proxies Required For Web Scraping?
Since web scraping involves sending a vast number of requests to multiple websites, there are specific technical considerations involved. While it is not illegal to do web scraping, the continuous requests could be misinterpreted as potential threats, and this can make the security systems block the IP from which the data requests came. To avoid this and to ensure the security of your operations, it is advised to make use of proxies when using web scraping.
Proxies act as a middle layer that hides your physical IP address and exposes a proxy IP to the websites you request data from. This helps you carry out web scraping reliably and ensures your privacy is secured. Using proxies is mandatory if you are planning to employ web scraping on a functional scale for a business.
Methods to Employ Web Scraping
While it is a fact that your business needs web scraping, there are two ways you can go about deploying your actual business model.
- In-house infrastructure for web scraping
This method calls for a complete setup for web scraping built from scratch in your own company. While this could offer you reliable web scraping in the long term, the starting costs involved are higher. You need to set up the hardware resources, develop web scraping skills with your existing employees, or hire new talents, and only outsource for the proxies.
- Outsourcing web scrapers
By outsourcing your web scraping needs, you only have to pay for the subscriptions you have made and have enough time and resources left for concentrating on your data analysis and further developments in your business.
Web scraping can be left to the experts who will be able to quickly gather up the data based on your requirements. You do not have to worry about setting up a whole new infrastructure and related technicalities as it is all taken care of by service providers.
The significant advantage of this method is the huge proxy pool that web scraping services are able to provide you. Therefore, they have more extensive options and expertise to assure you with a reliable and fast web scraping.
The Wrap Up
With the market getting more competitive every day, outsourcing a web scraper is the best way to go about it. By outsourcing your web scraping, you can make sure you get the desired results with minimal effort. Setting up a web scraper and dedicated resources can be time and money consuming. Assigning the groundwork to experts will save you time and ensure reliable data that can be of any format you desire. With more businesses relying on web data, the market is abundant with trustworthy web scraping service providers.
There are a lot of options to choose from in outsourcing, where providers can easily scale up and down their web scraping services as per your business needs.
