What Is AI Web Scraping?
Whether it is to protect their properties or perform better in the marketplace, more businesses are looking for inventive ways to do business better.
Informed business insights and strategies that birth impressive results and improved business performances must come from analysed data. And this data can be found on the web.
This is why web scraping and crawling are increasingly becoming a huge deal. But even the regular web scraping no longer suffices in developing the kind of business intelligence required to run a successful brand in today’s world.
To keep up with the times, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven web scrapers were developed and AI web scraping is currently being used to make it easier for businesses to gather data faster and develop deeper business insights.
Main challenges of web scraping
Web scraping (also sometimes called web “spidering” or crawling) is a process that involves accessing multiple websites, marketplaces, public social media channels, and even applications and extracting public data from them.
An effective web scraping process must be able to gather high-quality and useful data in a large amount. This can be a very tedious and time-consuming process with several challenges such as:
- The complexity of the process
Web scraping is, essentially, crawling multiple websites at the same time. And these websites are all built differently and in different formats. This makes it very difficult to have a single web scraper that can access all the types of websites that exist. Better put, a single cap can not fit all.
- Time and Resources
Another challenge with web scraping is the amount of time and resources required to collect a sufficient amount of useful data. Data extraction, parsing, analysis, and rendering may take days to complete, which can be unsatisfying because companies usually need data in real-time to initiate brand protection or make crucial decisions.
- Cost of proxy acquisition and management
Some tools used in data scraping can be overly expensive. And not just that, some are equally expensive to manage. Hence, proxies that require constant management and infrastructural maintenance can prove very difficult to use for data extraction.
- Fetching and parsing data
Once data has been extracted, it needs to be parsed if it must be turned into a meaningful form that can then be used. The problem here is the data extracted from different websites usually come in other formats; hence it is not possible to parse all of them the same way.
And all these problems can make web scraping almost unapproachable. Luckily, AI web scraping was introduced into the mix to add intelligence into the process, thereby eliminating these issues and more.
AI-powered web scraping as a solution
There is a traditional web scraping, and then there is web scraping powered by Artificial Intelligence. While regular web scraping helps you curate useful data from different sources, AI-powered web scraping does the same thing but with intelligence.
Websites, however different, are built using specific, clearly defined patterns. An AI-driven web scraper tries to spot and learn these patterns while extracting information from these websites. Once the AI application has successfully identified and learned the patterns, the entire process becomes more exciting and even automated.
Some of these Machine Learning (ML) powered solutions can also easily handle issues relating to proxy pool management and data parsing, turning large data gathering into a straightforward task.
These, as well as the guarantee of a higher success rate with fewer delays and errors, are some of the reasons AI-powered solutions are gaining wider popularity amongst businesses. Check this website for more information about AI-powered web scraping.
Advantages of AI web scraping
Some of the advantages of AI-driven solutions are as follows:
- Guarantees higher levels of accuracy
From how the information is gathered to how it is parsed and analysed, AI solutions tend to do a more accurate job above the human-level. AI web scraping process is less likely to contain any errors, which is precisely what every business today needs.
- Scalable and easily adaptable
Whether it is a single webpage or millions of web pages, AI-powered solutions have no troubles taking on just about any task as they can quickly scale. Such a level of adaptability is essential to handle data from various websites and in different countries.
- Requires low maintenance
Regular web scraping works through defined rules; they crawl and extract information from websites as long as they meet the algorithm’s requirements and break down even at the slightest changes on the page layout. Hence, there is always the need to maintain and redesign traditional scrapers.
However, this is not the case with AI-powered tools, as they are designed to quickly learn and adapt to whatever changes occur during data extraction.
Conclusion
Nothing is simple anymore, and that includes web scraping. Maybe that is a good thing because the more complicated things get, the more it inspires us to find better ways of doing things. This is evident in the discovery and application of AI in web scraping, which has revolutionised the entire process.
Many businesses from various industries are now leaping on-board and utilising AI web scraping because it offers many advantages, including speed and more accurate results.
