Running an online business puts you up against an endless line of competitors. If you want to grow your business at a steady rate and make sure that you have the best offer possible, you will have to use all available technology to get an edge over your competition.
One of the best and most effective methods of gathering information is, of course, web scraping. It’s a practice being used by businesses for years, and the latest technology advancements in the form of AI will make the technique even more successful. Stay with us, and we’ll explain how everything works.
Defining Web Scraping
Web scraping is currently the go-to solution for businesses who want to monitor competitors and see what they are doing to attract new customers. It’s a practice that allows extraction and analytics of massive amounts of data that can be used to improve offers, services, products, and entire business operations.
Web scraping is also known as “web crawling” or “web spidering” because it allows users to gather the information they need from multiple websites simultaneously. It’s one of the most important tools in every business arsenal as most future business strategies are based on data scraped from other websites.
However, web scrapers today are used by businesses for many other uses. For example, businesses use web-scraping tools to monitor competitor’s prices, find out what they do to improve sales and conversion rates, and so on. It’s a powerful tool that often defines the future of a business or company.
How Scraping Works
Web scrapers are generally complex software that interacts with website structure to extract data and export it in a different, readable format. If you want to find some specific information, the first thing you have to do is to provide the scraper with all URLs which you want to target.
Then, you have to define the type of information it should target. Provide a keyword or multiple keywords, and the scraper will extract all data from the websites you chose as long as it relates to the keyword you selected. That includes data such as product prices, customer reviews, and so on.
Once the scraper has collected the data you’ve asked for, it extracts it in new formats such as Excel spreadsheets, as an example. You can then use data analytics tools to get the specific information you want.
Today, most web scrapers use proxies to bypass website restrictions, as most sites use tools designed to block scrapers from extracting information. Datacenter and residential proxies are by far the most popular types used to ensure online anonymity by switching your original IP with another one to hide your location and identity.
How AI can Improve Web Scraping
AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, and it’s quickly finding its way into most technologies we use today. AI can help remove mistakes made by humans and provide better results in the end. Today, most smartphones, software solutions, and even devices have some form of AI.
When it comes to web scraping, AI can help businesses make better-informed decisions by ensuring they use the right data to get the best results. AI can help cut down on the time needed to collect and extract key information. It can gather, process, and extract much bigger volumes of data than traditional web scraping. For example, Next-Gen Residential Proxies by Oxylabs is one of the pioneering solutions of combining proxy compatibilities with AI and Machine Learning algorithms to achieve the highest success rates in scraping operations.
Businesses, far and wide, will use AI to collect data and create better offers. The proper use of AI in web scraping will result in better offers, prices, ad campaigns, audience targeting, and so on.
Benefits of Using AI Web Scraping
AI-powered web scraping offers a drastic improvement over already powerful traditional web scraping. As AI technology becomes available for more and more businesses, it improves and provides new benefits over time. Here’s a quick overview of the most significant benefits of AI web scraping:
- Faster data collection – AI web scraping is much faster, and data segmentation is more detailed.
- Ability to collect more data – It can also help collect data from many more websites than before.
- Better data accuracy – The gathered data is much more accurate and provides more value.
- Serious time-saver – The new AI can crunch far more information much faster than traditional methods.
Conclusion
AI-powered web scraping will soon become the go-to solution for most businesses and companies all over the world. It’s got a role in all industries, and it can help improve offers and targeting much more efficiently than traditional web scraping.
As a result, businesses will be able to make better decisions based on the information extracted from much more sources than ever before. In other words, AI web scraping will soon become a key factor for online business success.
