Web scraping is an automated technique through which a system program stockpiles the publicly available data for specific purposes like it could be used for marketing or could be used for research. A web scraping software could browse directly through HTTP or using any web browser. It is a process of copying data from a source and storing it in your database, and further utilizing it for analysis or repossession. This technique is beneficial in many ways. For example, if a person needs to make a price comparison or to monitor price fluctuation, then this would be very advantageous for him/her.
Web scraping could be used in a variety of ways. But necessarily it would be helpful in your business by researching e-commerce and market. And for doing so, you need a web scraper tool. And here are some of the ways to take advantage of web scraping:
- It could be advantageous in improving your products and services by keeping an eye on your competitors. Also, it will be beneficial to understand your customer’s exact needs.
- It would be very helpful to expand your business through e-mail marketing.
- It would be an aid while making a price comparison of products and services.
- It could be used to gather data from social sites to know what is trending.
- It could also be utilized to research data sites to collect statistics.
There are many more advantages of web scraping, and you can utilize them according to your need. But while doing so, there are some challenges too which a scraper could face. So, here are some web scrapping challenges that you should know about:
1. Data Hindrance
While dealing with the web scraping, you may often observe hindrance by some data sites. They could have limited the data access once per IP to break the data scraping process. The sites are designed in such a way that it restricts an IP if found a lot of access requests from it.
Due to which you may not be able to collect the whole required data. To deal with it, you could contact the site owner, or to deal with this challenge, you should opt for the Smartproxy that could result as an aid to collect data from those sites. It collects data from a site by using a variety of unique IP addresses.
2. Actual-time Data Scraping
Real-time scraping of data could be vital if you want to make price comparison or to track inventory. While performing data scraping, one has to be very careful. The change in data or to update data could be done so quickly, and this change in data might be very profitable for your business.
So, a scraper needs to aware of monitoring analyzing the website while performing a data scraping. But, it could be some delay because requesting, and delivery of data may take time. Thus, dealing with huge data in actual-time could be a challenge.
3. Change in Web Structure
To maintain its UI or to enhance its accessibility, a website may need an update regularly or over a period. And if you are gathering data from that site, then you must update your scraping tool too. And if somehow you have not updated as per your need, then you will not be capable of gathering data anymore.
So, monitoring, updating, and observing are mandatory so that you have a continuous data flow to your database. Any kind of failure in this updation process could result in an unfinished scraping or even occur a data crash.
4. Data Quality
While performing data scraping, one has to face a common challenge of data integrity. When scraping a website, there could be short of accuracy in data that may not be good for your business. If any kind of inaccuracy occurs, it could result in adversely. So, a scraper needs to ensure accuracy while scraping.
It is crucial to understand the diligence associated with meeting the data quality norms. And, through this step, you could provide or to store the data which can be beneficial for boosting up your sales, performance, productivity, and could also be an aid towards reaching your business goals.
5. Load Speed
Some websites are designed such that they might fail to load or may give a slower response when they receive more requests to access data. Gathering data from such sites could be challenging because a scraper doesn’t know how to get rid of this problem. Some tools deal with this by permitting a user to reload or to perform an auto-try when any such issue arises. This could be a remedy of low loading speed.
6. Traps
Some websites have a virtual trap, or we can say a ‘Honeypot’ trap to attract attackers or anyone who sends a lot of requests to access data. The traps are designed in such a way so that it’s not visible to a visitor but can be detected by a web crawler.
In some cases, they hide it by changing the color to cover these traps. So, in today’s modern era, ‘honeypot’ traps is one of the complicated challenges faced by a scraper while scraping a website.
