Advantages and Disadvantages of Web Scraping

What is web scraping?

As the name implies, web scraping means capturing and storing the online data displayed on an internet site. Web Scraping Service is nothing but an essential software facility capable of extracting information from the websites on the internet in a fast and efficient manner. There are scores of techniques of web scraping that operate automatically with the help of Hypertext Transfer Protocol or embedding the browsers to help users surf the internet all the time without any interruption. Live every other technology, Web Scraping also has a few advantages and disadvantages associated with it. Let us have a peek at them. Even though a vastly popular practice, web scraping also has its share of pros and cons.

The Advantages of Web Scraping:

1. Cost-Effective: Web Scraping Service provide an important service at a competitive cost. The data will have to collect back from websites and analyzed so that the internet functions regularly. Web scraping services manage to do this in a cost-effective and budget-friendly manner.
2. Low maintenance and Speed: Web Scraping does have a very low maintenance cost associated with it over a while. In that way, it helps plan the budget accurately. Also, web scraping saves a lot of time, as it can do a day’s manual work in a few hours.
3. Accuracy: Simple errors in data extraction can lead to major issues. Hence it is needed to ensure that the data is correct. Web Scraping is not only a fast process, but it’s accurate too. This reputation helps web scraping while collecting important data such as sales price, financial data to name a few.
4. Easy to Implement: Once a Web scraping service starts collecting data, you can rest assured that you are getting data from not just a single page but from the whole domain. With a one time investment, a lot of data can be collected.

The Disadvantages of Web Scraping :

1. Data Analysis of Data Retrieved Through Web Scraping: To analyze the retrieved data, it needs to be treated first. This often becomes a time-consuming work.
2. Difficult to Analyze: For those, who are not much tech-savvy and aren’t an expert, web scraping can be a confusing process. Even though, it’s not a major issue.
3. Speed and Protection Policies: Most of the web scraping services are slower than API calls. Many websites don’t allow screen scraping. It is a huge challenge to Web Scraping. Also, if any code of the target website gets changed, web scrapping stops capture the data.

Conclusion:
There may be a lot of advantages and disadvantages of web scraping that are present currently. But data scraping is the way forward and it has a drastic and great effect on organizations who want data. Data Scraping is a completely ethical and legal process.