5 Benefits of AI Web Scraping

Making informed business decisions quickly has never been this important. Because it is directly tied to accurate data in real-time, efficient data scraping has never been this important.

Data can prove useful in various business insights, making specific decisions, and monitoring and securing brand assets. Gathering and analysing data require web scraping, which, if we are honest, is not an entirely straightforward process.

There are many challenges associated with web scraping. Some of these challenges include the difficulty in curating and parsing an enormous amount of data, the time and resources it takes, and the complexity with which various websites are built. AI web scraping has now been discovered to be the only way to overcome the said challenges and introduce intelligence and automation to web scraping.

What is web scraping?

Generally, web scraping is seen as a collection of processes used in harvesting public data from various online platforms such as websites, social media, key marketplaces, databases, and applications.

The data extracted are sometimes referred to as analytics and are essential in discovering hidden business insights and taking crucial business decisions. When done correctly, web scraping can improve brand value and reputation and increase sales and revenue.

How web scraping works?

The process of web scraping generally follows the steps described below:

• The target destination is identified.
• A request is made for data extraction.
• In most cases, the request is passed through the proxy, concealing its original internet protocol (IP) address and location.
• The request reaches the target destination and begins to extract the HTML code.
• Then it uses locators to identify the location of critical data within the HTML code.
• The data string containing all useful information is passed to the proxy server.
• Lastly, the scraped public data is converted to the appropriate format before being transferred to a data storage system provided by the brand.

Implementation of AI in web data scraping

Web scraping is steadily becoming a challenging task but does not mean businesses will stop collecting public data. Companies need data to function, and where the traditional web scraping fails, AI web scraping triumphs generously.

AI web scraping is a process that uses advanced web scraping technologies to read, extract, and parse information from the web.

The process can be described as both intelligent and automatic because it tries to train itself while extracting data simultaneously. The training allows it to learn and understand the patterns within each web page visited using human-like thinking to gain knowledge. Once this is complete, the process can then run automatically to extract structured data from even the most unstructured files.

The training also allows the AI-powered tool to merge similar data extracted from different places together optimally. This increases the accuracy of the overall results. AI for web scraping is used to automate the data extraction process and ensure high-quality results quickly.

5 benefits of AI web scraping

While there are several benefits of using AI for web data scraping, we highlighted the most common ones:

1. Increases the speed of data extraction

Accessing data from multiple websites at once means having to deal with speed. Moreover, the data needs to be scraped and used in real-time. While this may prove difficult with other traditional web scraping tools, the AI-driven ones can significantly fast-track the data extraction process.

2. Can handle larger volumes of data

Brands that use AI web scraping have the extra advantage of extracting more data from more websites at once. They also get the option of doing this automatically.

3. Guarantees higher accuracy

Extracting a large amount of data is almost useless if it is not done with high accuracy. This single benefit is enough to make AI the most beloved technology amongst brands because it does not only collect data in larger batches and in record time but does so with an above-human-level accuracy.

4. Saves time

Spending too much time merely extracting and analysing data could make brands take away attention from other important aspects of the business leading to a drop in sales and revenue.

AI web scraping prevents this by saving them a lot of time.

5. Reduces overall cost

AI solutions may be expensive to invest in, but they can save many costs once they are up and running. For instance, because it can learn enough to run automatically, AI tools can eliminate the cost of initiating subsequent data collection.

Also, these tools can save brands the cost of routine maintenance as they do not require constant care and redesigns like traditional web scraping tools do every time there is a breakdown. Learn more about AI and ML-powered web scraping tools by visiting the Oxylabs website.

Conclusion

The web is a rich source of useful public data, and web scraping usually allows companies to fetch and use them. But as the demand for more data continues to increase, the lapses in traditional web scraping become more apparent.

To take care of these lapses, AI web scraping was invented and, with it, came many new opportunities and benefits.