The history of web scraping
Web Scraping or Data Crawling or Data Harvesting
has been into the existence for as long as the Web itself. Although it is often
associated with web content extraction, it has not always served this purpose.
Initially, it was developed to automate complicated or painful tasks. The
purpose behind commercial web scraping has always been to gain easy commercial
advantages like competitor’s product prices, stealing leads, hijacking
marketing campaigns, redirecting APIs, and the outright theft of content and
data.
Web scraping is the method which helps to take
or extract the content from a website with the intent of using it for purposes
outside the direct control of the site owner. The first usage of web scraping
was to link with testing frameworks. With the help of using tools such as
Selenium, companies such as IP-Label have build products that enable web
developers and web masters to monitor the performance of website on a daily
basis.
Web scraping is akin to web indexing, the process
by which search engines index web content. The difference is the robots.txt
“rule”, which governs where bots may go on a site. Web indexers (“good bots”)
follow the rules; web scrapers, on the other hand, simply steal whatever
content they’ve been programmed to fetch – prices, promotions, offers, or
information that would otherwise only be available to paid subscribers or
authorized business partners.
Web crawlers visit web pages, acquire data, and
discover new pages from the ‘seed’ pages. Though most people believe that
Google was probably the first crawler to crawl the web in its entirety, web
crawling as a technology has a rather long and interesting history behind it.
Although the initial crawlers could only crawl the data, when modern day web crawlers
are much smarter as they are capable of monitoring web applications for
vulnerability and accessibility apart from web crawling.
Initially, the internet was even unsearchable.
When there was no existence of any search engine, the internet was just a place
of collection of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site in which users would
navigate to find specific shared files. During that time, people created a
specific automated program, known today as Web Crawler or Bot. It helps to find
and organize distributed data available on the internet. This web crawler or
bot fetches all pages which are available on the internet and then extract all
the content into a database for indexing.
The first crawlers were developed for a much
smaller web – about 1,00,000 web pages, but today some of the popular websites
alone have millions of pages.
Eventually, with the help of search engine, the
millions of web pages were added and it becomes the home of millions of web
data in multiple forms, including audios, videos, images, and texts. It turns
into an open data source.
Since the internet became a sea of data source
which is easily searchable, people started to find it simple to extract any
publicly available data they want. But the problem occurred when some of the
websites refused to give a download option, and copying data manually was
obviously tedious and inefficient.
And that’s when Web Scraping method or word took
birth. Web scraping is actually powered by bots/web crawlers that function the
same way those used in search engines – Fetch and Copy. Web scraping focuses on
extracting any specific data from the website whereas search engines often
fetch most of the websites around the internet.
How X-Byte Has Observed a Rise of Web Scraping?
When the X-Byte took a
baby step in the year of 2012 in web scraping industry, nobody was aware of the
sector in spite of having huge demand of the data in the world. There was only
some web scraping service provider companies
who were fulfilling customer’s needs by delivering accurate data. Even though,
the speed, accuracy, data maintenance were ignore by them. By establishing the
mark in web scraping, X-Byte initiated their journey by scraping 3 Millions of
web pages per month data from the web and delivering to customer.
Holding a strong performance, infrastructure,
human power and leveraging the latest technologies, it was very difficult to
stop X-Byte by delivering the user-centric services. Walking along with the
latest tools and technology, year by year, X-Byte has improvised skills,
techniques and speed. From extracting 3 Millions of web pages in 2012 to 100
Million of web pages in 2019, that’s how X-Byte has footprint their steps in
the web scraping industry.
Year |
WebPages
Crawled per Month |
2012 |
30M |
2014 |
160M |
2016 |
450M |
2019 |
1B |
Here are the most demanding domains that are
crawled:
1. E-Commerce Websites
E-commerce platform is the biggest assets for
any retailers or organization. It propels the retailers, sellers and
distributors to boost the sales and revenue. When the web scraping is applied
to any e-commerce platform, it opens the door for retailers by providing price
monitoring and brand & reputation monitoring.
With price monitoring service, you can extract
the price, catalogue, inventory levels, availability and get the efficient web data extraction
services that leverage online information for your success.
By leveraging the brand monitoring services, you
can monitor and collect the information from online to enable micro or macro
level decision. Once you gather data with web scraping, you can have the data
report of the product and can tweak their launch marketing campaign to enhance
visibility.
2. Social Media Platforms
The trend of Social Media has grown very swiftly
and has become an essential part of personal as well as professional life.
Every organization is very active on social media platforms like Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, etc. Thus, the web scraping industry has left its no stone
unturned in social media.
Social Media Monitoring plays a vital
role nowadays in the various industries. Social Media monitoring extracts the
user’s emotions, their feelings, their thoughts, hashtags, and social media
trends. This helps to monitor posts, send alerts, and analyze social media
trends that can be helpful to you to create any strategy on social media. Thus,
social media extraction or extracting data from social media websites has made
social media data mining easy and business effective.
3. Travel Portals (Hotel and Flight Websites)
Travel portals like hotel and flight websites
provide the information like hotel reviews, flight price, ratings. feedback,
room availability and price, discounts, location, and etc. By extracting your
competitor’s hotels review that will help you identify their weakness and
strength which would enhance your marketing strategy.
Travel website data
extraction is important as it helps grabbing the ever-expanding user generated
content that travel & hospitality industry is interested for
product/service reviews, feedback, complaints, brand
monitoring brand analysis, competitor analysis, trend watching
and more.
4. Real Estate Websites & Job Portals
The leading real estate sites of the world are a
treasure trove of valuable data. The database of any of popular real estate
site might contain information on more than 100 million homes. These homes
include the ones for sale, rent, or even ones not currently on the market. It
helps owners, as well as customers, plan better by trying to estimate the
prices of properties in the next one, five or even ten years.
The real estate websites have valid data
information like – property details, buyer and seller details, agent
information, property details, etc. This huge amount of data will surely help
you take smart decision to generate maximize revenue.
Since the job portals have huge amount of data
of employees or candidates, job listings and data feeds service is used to
aggregate huge amounts of job postings and its related information from the job
portals at one place. It gives you a notification and keep you updated with job
listing alters through APIs and emails when job postings are listed and
removed.
5. Other Websites
There are many other websites like news portals,
classified, auction, search engines, online business directories, and so on
also gives you the data of your wish. They also contain various types of data
which might be used for multiple organizations.
The extracted data from various websites can be
integrated into the business to achieve the future business goals and
objectives.
What Will Be The Future of Web Scraping?
Data is the new oil in recent times. Many
industries or organizations are hungry for data. Therefore, we extract the data
from the internet, process and turn into actionable insights. The internet has
become an ocean of data where more data is generated every second.
Now any organization or company are able to
fetch the data they want with the help of web crawler/bot, API, standard
libraries and crawling software, as long as it’s publicly available on the web.
The demand for web data by companies increase
day by day and that keeps driving the web scraping industry, bringing new
markets, jobs, and business opportunities.
However, we can’t deny the fact that as far as
there is an internet, the web scraping can never be faded. It’s still
unpredictable and volatile at the moment, as to how web scraping and data
crawling will take its shape in the market.
So in the end, there is no doubt that the
internet and web scraping are and will always keep going along like this with
each other in the foreseeable future.
For more visit: https://www.xbyte.io/the-history-of-web-scraping.php
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