Web data scraping has emerged as the next big thing in the e-commerce world. The pricing strategy, business insights, competitive intelligence and comparisons derived from online websites is too beneficial to ignore. Knowing that the internet is an endless source of information, it is almost impossible for retailers to utilizethe tremendous amount of data without the help of web scraping technologies. Since data scraping is a relatively new and demanding procedure, there are some myths surrounding it.

5 Myths about Web Data Scraping

1. Web Scraping Requires the Knowledge of Coding.

You don’t need to be a pro-programmer in order to extract data from the internet. There are many web scrapers and software that process, scrub and edit data on their own. There isn’t much left to do for the users.

  2.Web Scraping Produces Usable Data.

Web scraping doesn’t guarantee the usability, value, and quality of the generated data file. Scraped data may contain duplicate entries and noise (unwanted elements) that get scraped along with the useable data. Besides using an automated tool, you would require the help of a scraping service to process and convert data into a useable format.

3.Data Scraping is Illegal.

Crawling a website using a search engine is legal unless a website owner has blocked crawlers or has a TOS page which shows they disapprove web scraping. However, one needs to follow certain practices and ethics while scraping sites.

4.Web Scraping involves Data Extraction from the HTML.

Web scraping is much more than fetching data from the HTML. It focuses on cleaning unused, duplicated and redundant data and focuses on only that part that is required for visualization and analytics. Just because you are accessing HTML sites doesn’t mean you can get inside their code and extract all information, including the confidential one.

5.It is Possible to Scrape Data from any Source.

Although the websites aren’t protected by a technical shield, yet, website owners follow standard practices to make their resources scrape-proof. If the site uses a lot of captchas, scraper traps and layers of defense then it is not a good idea to extract info from them.
Clearing these misconceptions about web data scraping will help you utilize this technology for using insightful data. If you do it the right way, you can easily use it to your advantage!