How We Maintain Data Quality While Handling Large Scale Extraction

How We Maintain Data Quality While Handling Large Scale Extraction

The demand for high quality data is increasing along with the rise in products and services that require data to run. Although the information available on the web is increasing in terms of quantity and quality, extracting it in a clean, usable format remains challenging to most businesses. Having been in the web data extraction business for long enough, we have come to identify the best practices and tactics that would ensure high quality data from the web.

At PromptCloud, we not only make sure data is accessible to everyone, we make sure it’s of high quality, clean and delivered in a structured format. Here is how we maintain the quality while handling zettabytes of data for hundreds of clients from across the world.

Manual QA process

1. Crawler review

Every web data extraction project starts with the crawler setup. Here, the quality of the crawler code and its stability is of high priority as this will have a direct impact on the data quality. The crawlers are programmed by our tech team members who have high technical acumen and experience. Once the crawler is made, two peers review the code to make sure that the optimal approach is used for extraction and to ensure there are no inherent issues with the code. Once this is done, the crawler is deployed on our dedicated servers.

2. Data review

The initial set of data starts coming in when the crawler is run for the first time. This data is manually inspected, first by the tech team and then by one of our business representatives before the setup is finalized. This manual layer of quality check is thorough and weeds out any possible issues with the crawler or the interaction between the crawler and website. If issues are found, the crawler is tweaked to eliminate them completely before the setup is marked complete.

Automated monitoring

Websites get updated over time, quite frequently than you’d imagine. Some of these changes could break the crawler or cause it to start extracting the wrong data. This is why we have developed a fully automated monitoring system to watch over all the crawling jobs happening on our servers. This monitoring system continuously checks the incoming data for inconsistencies and errors. There are three types of issues it can look for:

1. Data validation errors

Every data point has a defined value type. For example, the data point ‘Price’ will always have a numerical value and not text. In cases of website changes, there can be class name mismatches that might cause the crawler to extract wrong data for a certain field. The monitoring system will check if all the data points are in line with their respective value types. If an inconsistency is found, the system immediately sends out a notification to the team members handling that project and the issue is fixed promptly.

2. Volume based inconsistencies

There can be cases where the volume count for records significantly drop or increase in an irregular fashion. This is a red sign as far as web crawling goes. The monitoring system will already have the expected record count for different projects. If inconsistencies are spotted in the data volumes, the system sends out a prompt notification.

3. Site changes

Structural changes happening to the target websites is the main reason why crawlers break. This is monitored by our dedicated monitoring system, quite aggressively. The tool performs frequent checks on the target site to make sure nothing has changed since the previous crawl. If changes are found, it sends out notifications for the same.
High end servers

It is understood that web crawling is a resource-intensive process that needs high performance servers. The quality of servers will determine how smooth the crawling happens and this in turn has an impact on the quality of data. Having firsthand experience in this, we use high-end servers to deploy and run our crawlers. This helps us avoid instances where crawlers fail due to the heavy load on servers.

Data cleansing

The initially crawled data might have unnecessary elements like HTML tags. In that sense, this data can be called crude. Our cleansing system does an exceptionally good job at eliminating these elements and cleaning up the data thoroughly. The output is clean data without any of the unwanted elements.

Structuring

Structuring is what makes the data compatible with databases and analytics systems by giving it a proper, machine readable syntax. This is the final process before delivering the data to the clients. With structuring done, the data is ready to be consumed either by importing it to a database or plugging to an analytics system. We deliver the data in multiple formats – XML, JSON and CSV which also adds to the convenience of handling it.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-we-maintain-data-quality-web-data-extraction

Web Scraping – A trending technique in data science!!!

Web Scraping – A trending technique in data science!!!

Web scraping as a market segment is trending to be an emerging technique in data science to become an integral part of many businesses – sometimes whole companies are formed based on web scraping. Web scraping and extraction of relevant data gives businesses an insight into market trends, competition, potential customers, business performance etc.  Now question is that “what is actually web scraping and where is it used???” Let us explore web scraping, web data extraction, web mining/data mining or screen scraping in details.

What is Web Scraping?

Web Data Scraping is a great technique of extracting unstructured data from the websites and transforming that data into structured data that can be stored and analyzed in a database. Web Scraping is also known as web data extraction, web data scraping, web harvesting or screen scraping.

What you can see on the web that can be extracted. Extracting targeted information from websites assists you to take effective decisions in your business.

Web scraping is a form of data mining. The overall goal of the web scraping process is to extract information from a websites and transform it into an understandable structure like spreadsheets, database or csv. Data like item pricing, stock pricing, different reports, market pricing, product details, business leads can be gathered via web scraping efforts.

There are countless uses and potential scenarios, either business oriented or non-profit. Public institutions, companies and organizations, entrepreneurs, professionals etc. generate an enormous amount of information/data every day.

Uses of Web Scraping:

The following are some of the uses of web scraping:

- Collect data from real estate listing
- Collecting retailer sites data on daily basis
- Extracting offers and discounts from a website.
- Scraping job posting.
- Price monitoring with competitors.
- Gathering leads from online business directories – directory scraping
- Keywords research
- Gathering targeted emails for email marketing – email scraping
- And many more.

There are various techniques used for data gathering as listed below:

- Human copy-and-paste – takes lot of time to finish when data is huge
- Programming the Custom Web Scraper as per the needs.
- Using Web Scraping Softwares available in market.

Are you in search of web data scraping expert or specialist. Then you are at right place. We are the team of web scraping experts who could easily extract data from website and further structure the unstructured useful data to uncover patterns, and help businesses for decision making that helps in increasing sales, cover a wide customer base and ultimately it leads to business towards growth and success.

Source:http://webdata-scraping.com/web-scraping-trending-technique-in-data-science/

Tips For Data Scrapping in PDF File

Tips For Data Scrapping in PDF File

What is the Data Scrapping?

End data, a method or a procedure in which material is extracted from the text refers to a document. A person using this process can remove material from a PDF file format.

Those involved in commercial activities may fall short on data disposal. It is a process in which data or information can be extracted from the Portable Document Format file. They have tools that automatically format data that different provisions may be found on the Internet are easy to use. These advanced tools to the needs of users can gather information. Users do just words or phrases and all related equipment, Portable Document Format file that will extract the necessary information available to enter. It is widely used to collect information from an editable format.

Portable Document Format files are a major asset to protect the originality of the documents you convert from Word to PDF data. Algorithms the image file compression file sizes are due to heavy graphics or content are less. A portable Data Scrapping document format or to fix any software, hardware independent. File encryption enhances the security of its content allows.

How data from a PDF file, you can scrap?

A portable document format that an application for exchange or transfer data over the content or the platform can be used. Part of storing large amounts of data as a simple tool can use this program. Easy and rapid application materials in a portable document format can handle. The computer program that more or stored in a Portable Document Format file is a variety of data extracted.

Valuable content in a particular file can remove a non-editable. An application containing a PDF document can make large amounts of valuable information. This technique of sampling equipment reports, theses, presentations, projects, manuals and other documents those are useful to prepare.

Information out to eliminate important data in the format support. Easily extracted from a person can keep the formatting of the data intact and secure. You and PDF documents on a variety of subjects to make a number of Word may be for information purposes. A scene from a non-editable file can delete content or images. Therefore, with text and graphics can be extracted.

A Portable Document Format is an application that is used for a variety of reasons. A personal password, certificates and digital signatures can encrypt files using. It is portable and compatible format that allows you to transfer your files in Portable Document Format is applied. The request to use the information for a variety of reports can be prepared properly.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/business-articles/outsourcing-articles/tips-data-scrapping-pdf-file-492673.html#ixzz4hmydaqhY

Web Data and Web Scraping

Web Data and Web Scraping

You can get web data through a process called web scraping. Since websites are created in a human readable format, software can’t meaningfully analyze this information. While you could manually (read: the time-consuming route) input this data into a format more palatable to programs, web scraping automates this process and eliminates the possibility of human error.

How You Can Use Web Data

If you’re new to the world of web data or looking for creative ways to channel this resource, here are three real world examples of entrepreneurs who use scraped data to accelerate their startups.
Web Data for Price Monitoring

The key to staying ahead of your competitors online is to have excellent online visibility, which is why we invest so much in paid advertising (Google Adwords). But it occurred to me that if you aren’t offering competitive prices, then you’re essentially throwing money down the drain. Even if you have good visibility, users will look elsewhere to buy once they’ve seen your prices.

Although I used to spend hours scrolling through competitor sites to make sure that I was matching all of their prices, it took far too long and probably wasn’t the best use of my time. So instead, I started scraping websites and exporting the pricing information into easily readable spreadsheets.

This saves me huge amounts of time, but also saves my copywriter time as they don’t have to do as much research. We usually outsource the scraping, as we don’t really trust ourselves to do it properly! The most important aspect of this process is having the data in an easily readable format. Spreadsheets are great, but even they can become too muddled up with unnecessary information.

Enriched Web Data for Lead Generation

We use a variety of different sources and data to get our clients more leads and sales. This is really beneficial to our clients that include national and international brands who all use this information to specifically target an audience, boost conversions, increase engagement and/or reduce customer acquisition costs.

Web data can help you know which age groups, genders, locations, and devices convert the best. If you have existing analytics already in place, you can enrich this data with data from around the web, like reviews and social media profiles, to get a more complete picture. You’ll be able to use this enriched web data to tailor your website and your brand’s message so that it instantly connects to who your target customer is.

For example, by using these techniques, we estimate that our client Super Area Rugs will increase their annual revenue by $450,000.

Web Data for Competitor Monitoring

The coupon business probably seems docile from the outside but the reality is that many sites are backed by tens of millions of dollars in venture capital and there are only so many offers to go around. That means exclusive deals can easily get poached by competitors. So we use scraping to monitor our competition to ensure they’re not stealing coupons from our community and reposting them elsewhere.

Both the IT and Legal departments use this data–in IT, we use it more functionally, of course. Legal uses it as research before moving ahead with cease and desist orders.

And there you have it. Real use cases of web data helping companies with competitive pricing, competitor monitoring, and increasing conversion for sales. Keep in mind that it’s not just about having the web data, it’s also about quality and using a reputable company to provide you with the information you need to increase your revenue.

Source:https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2016/11/10/how-you-can-use-web-data-to-accelerate-your-startup/

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services

The aim of the data mining process is to collect the information from reliable online sources as per the requirement of the customer and convert it to a structured format for the further use. The major source of data mining is any of the internet search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN etc. Many search engines such as Google and Bing provide customized results based on the user’s activity history. Based on our keyword search, the search engine lists the details of the websites from where we can gather the details as per our requirement.

Collect the data from the online sources such as Company Name, Contact Person, Profile of the Company, Contact Phone Number of Email ID Etc. are doing for the marketing activities. Once the data is gathered from the online sources into a structured format, the marketing authorities will start their marketing promotions by calling or emailing the concerned persons, which may result to create a new customer. So basically data mining is playing a vital role in today’s business expansions. By outsourcing the data entry and its related works, you can save the cost that would be incurred in setting up the necessary infrastructure and employee cost.

Source:https://www.isnare.com/?aid=1839547&ca=Internet

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

15 Web Scraping Services to Extract Online Data

15 Web Scraping Services to Extract Online Data

Web Scraping or Web harvesting is a technique of extracting data from the multiple web pages. It is the process of gathering the information from world wide web. Actually, Web scraping is very tough and time-consuming process if you do not use any automation software. There are many scraping softwares or you can say scraping tools available which can extract your online data easily for your online businesses.

best-web-scraping-services-tools

Here is the list of best web scraping softwares or tools which are accepted by many organizations.

1. Import.io

Import.io is a web data extraction platform that follows the simple process to extract the web data. It builds your own datasets by importing the data from the web page & exporting the data into comma separated file format. As per the experts, Web app development company leaders and industry legends, it is the easiest way to extract your data. Import.io is having a strength to extract the data from the most complex sites. The best thing about Import.io is, without a single line of code, you can scrap a number of web pages easily.

2. Scrape Box

Scrape Box is specially designed for SEO service providing companies and the freelancers. It is the SEO tool that can be used for multipurpose SEO related stuff. It can be used for the multi purposes such as the search engine harvester, comment poster, link checker, keyword & proxy harvester, etc. Scrape Box makes SEO freelancers’ tasks easy as it is like a marketing helper which automatically does many tasks including harvesting URLs, link-building, competitive analysis, executing site audits, etc. Multi-threaded operation, Highly customizable as per your needs, low price, various free add-ons and 24/7 support are the other remarkable features that encourage people for use it.

3. CloudScrape

CloudScrape is the browser based editor or you can say data extraction tool generally used for web scraping, web crawling and big data collection in real time. It gives the facility of saving the collected data on different cloud platforms like Google Drive or Box.net. You can also export your collected data as CSV or JSON. This cloud-scraping service helps in navigation through websites, fill the form, build robots as well as extracting real time data.

4. TheWebMiner

TheWebminer is a popular company that offers high-level web data extraction solutions. It serves web scraping services along with the many more data processing solutions. It is offering automation and consulting services in the era of web data extraction. From one time scraping of the single site to daily reports of multiple competitors, TheWebMiner fulfills your all requirements down to the earth. It also provides data conversion from one format to any other format. It cleans your data by removing duplicates & other irrelevant content. Data analysis in different tiers can also be done by TheWebMiner.

5. 80legs

80legs is a powerful cum flexible web crawling service. Whether you want to use 80legs’ existing scrapers or you want to build your own scrapers, it provides the tool that can help you to scrap the data very speedily. The web scraper claims to over 6 lacs plus domains. Industry leaders like PayPal and MailChimp also use 80legs for web scraping & web crawling. High-performance web crawling with faster speed makes 80legs unique. You can run your own web crawls and/or collect data anywhere from the internet using 80legs.

6. Mozenda

Mozenda is the genuine and advanced data scraping and web data extraction tool recognized by many major brands. It comes with modern cloud-based architecture that offers fast deployment, scalability & easy accessibility. You just need to climb 3 stairs and you are done with your work. At first stair, extract your text, file or images from multiple web pages using Mozenda. At second stair, arrange your data files & export it into popular formats. At last; in the last stair, send your web data to your structured database. Mozenda is the well known because of it’s accuracy that leads to low maintenance.

7. ParseHub

ParseHub is the web browser extension that turns your dynamic websites into APIs. It also converts your poorly structured websites into the APIs without writing a code. It crawls single or multiple websites & also handles JavaScript, AJAX, cookies, redirects, sessions, etc. The user can solve major difficulties in collecting data using ParseHub.

8. Visual Web Ripper

Visual Web Ripper is one stop solution for Automated web scraping, Web harvesting and content extraction from the web. It is one type of web data extraction software that automatically comes to your website and gathers complete content structures. It also comes with some eccentric features like user-friendly visual project editor & repeatedly submit forms for all possible input values.

9. WebHose

WebHose, also known as Webhose.io is a web crawling & data integration software that provides immediate access to real-time & structured data. Continuously crawling thousands of online resources, supports in 240+ languages, covering a wide range of forums, blog platforms & news outlets, fastest integration, a variety of plans and affordable rates are the prominent features of the Webhose.io.

10. Fminer

Fminer is one of the best visual web scraping softwares. It comes with macro recorder and diagram designer. It is pretty easy to use web scraping, web harvesting, web crawling & web micro support software. Other important features are a visual design tool, ability to crawl web 2.0 dynamic websites, options of multiple crawl path navigation, multi-threaded crawling, nested data elements and captcha test, etc.

11. WebSundew

With high productivity & speed, WebSundew rules the world in terms of web scraping & web harvesting. It captures web data with high accuracy as well. It permits users to automate the entire process of extracting and storing the data from websites. It is having a facility of point and click user interface. Data extraction agent is there for given website. WebSundae also provides customer oriented professional support for any kind of query.

12. Content Grabber

Content Grabber is the perfect choice if you want to extract your data by web scraping and web automation. Customer uses this platform to build price comparison portals, market intelligence & monitoring, open source intelligence, content integration and migration, B2B integration or process automation, etc. So, you can also use Content Grabber for a similar type of services.

13. Spinn3r

Want to index blogs, news or social media? Here is the solution. Spinn3r give you the permission to fetch whole data from webblogs, news sites, social media sites, RSS & ATOM feeds, etc. It distributed with a full firehose API which handles 95% of the data indexing requirements. It provides a penetrable admin console. Full-text search, Boilerplate removal, fault tolerance, language and spam detection are the other main features of Spinn3r.

14. WinAutomation

WinAutomation is an automated tool that is specially designed to automate repetitive tasks on your computer. It automatically fills & submits web forms, automatically extracts the data from the web page into text / excel files. WinAutomation automates software robots, automate any desktop application, websites & web applications in such a modern way.

15. Outwit

Outwit is the next generation web harvesting semantic software tool. It is specialized in extracting & organizing online data and media. It will automatically discover a number of webpages or search engine results. Pro version of Outwit provides the facility to navigate from page to page in sequence of results. The tool also lets users extract links, images, email addresses & data tables.

Source:http://www.quertime.com/article/15-web-scraping-services-to-extract-online-data/