The job market has evolved significantly in recent years, and most jobs now involve data. However, data can be hard. Luckily, many techniques, approaches, and tools have been developed to make data easier and faster. Web scraping is one of these techniques, and it makes extracting data from web pages possible.
Note that most of the interesting data is publicly available online. Still, retrieving it takes time and effort, and this might prevent you from using data. Therefore, adopting a web scraping tool helps you override the obstacle of data retrieval, save time, and become more productive.
Working With Data Is Not as Hard as You Might Think
Entrepreneurs, marketers, software engineers, doctors, and several other professions all share the same thing in common: data. You might be unaware of it, but chances are your work also involves data in some way. Data helps you make decisions, define marketing strategies, and understand new customer needs. However, data still has a bad reputation for being difficult to use. The main reason is that data used to be something that only data engineers could understand. Today, this is no longer the case.
In detail, data collection and retrieval used to be particularly frustrating and tedious activities. You may have dealt with it before, spending several hours of your time extracting data from the Web to support your analysis or someone else's reports. Not everyone can afford to devote so many hours to such a task. Fortunately, new techniques have been developed to help anyone collect and analyze data, regardless of their technical skills. Web scraping is one of those.
What Is Web Scraping?
Considering the amount of data that is publicly available through the Web and how valuable this is, several methods to retrieve it have been developed. Web scraping is just that, retrieving data from the Web.
The Encyclopedia of Big Data defines web scraping as a technique to extract data from the World Wide Web (WWW) and save it to a file system or database for later retrieval or analysis. Typically, web data is extracted through the HTTP protocol or a web browser. Web scraping can be performed manually by a user or automatically by a bot, script, or advanced tool.
Simply put, web scraping can be thought of as the process of extracting data from web pages. Usually, this process also involves transforming the extracted data into a more convenient format, such as an Excel spreadsheet.
How Web Scraping Can Improve Your Productivity
Let's now consider three real-world scenarios where web scraping can make you more productive.
Imagine a situation where a decision needs to be supported by data. This is particularly common, for example, in the sports and finance sectors. Visiting websites to find the web page containing the data you are looking for, copying it, and transforming it into a more useful format is tedious, error-prone, and takes a lot of time. With web scraping, the whole process becomes a matter of launching scripts or a few clicks with the right tools. In this case, web scraping can drastically improve your productivity.
Now, suppose you need to find candidates for a job position. Going through all the candidates who applied for your job opening on LinkedIn or Indeed to select the ones who best fit your requirements is a time-consuming process. Web scraping allows you to turn all the data about candidates into an Excel spreadsheet, which can be used to apply filters and find what you are looking for. A process that takes days of work is reduced to a few minutes.
Web scraping can also improve the way you manage historical data. You may be asked to periodically retrieve online data to study historical trends, such as the price evolution of a product or commodity. This is the perfect scenario in which an automated web scraping script can free you from this repetitive task, doing all the work for you and allowing you to focus on what matters most. Again, web scraping enables you to save a lot of time.
3 Web Scraping Tools to Transform the Way You Work
At this point, you have realized that web scraping can improve your productivity. Yet, it may still sound very complex to you. When you think about scripts and automatization, you might assume they are something that only a software developer could deal with. This is not true, especially considering that web scraping tools have never been easier to use.
Let's now take a look at 3 tools that make web scraping easier and can transform the way you work.
1. Listly
The latest trend in web scraping is represented by browser extensions. Thanks to these tools, all you have to do to perform web scraping is add the extension to your browser, open a web page, and use the extension to extract the data you want.
Listly has been used by more than 100,000 users and has been used to convert data to Excel files more than 5 million times. This makes Listly one of the most popular Chrome extensions for web scraping currently available. Specifically, Listly is a web scraping service for everyone, from non-technical marketers to advanced developers, that turns web pages into an Excel spreadsheet in seconds. Listly's main advantage is that it enables you to select data of interest from a web page directly in your browser with just a few clicks. With Listly you can also save a web scraping task and schedule it daily. This means letting the browser extension make the repetitive work for you.
2. Import.io
Import.io is a cloud-based web platform that makes it easier to convert data semi-structured data extracted from web pages into structured data. You can think of semi-structured data as data that is not conventionally formatted, such as data displayed on a web page. On the contrary, structured data is based on a schema and comes in a standardized format. Structured data is easier to read, use, and understand and can then be used to perform analysis or drive business decisions. However, transforming unstructured data into structured data is a time-consuming process that is usually done manually. With import.io, you can save a lot of time by automatically extracting structured data from an entire website in no time and with no code.
3. Octoparse
Octoparse is a web scraping software that makes data extraction accessible to all users thanks to its point-and-click, visual, intuitive user interface. It supports non-technical users with pre-built task templates for popular websites. It also offers data detection algorithms to automatically scrape data from web pages. These features allow data to be retrieved from web pages in seconds and with just a couple of clicks. The tool also has an advanced mode for experienced users, which allows them to define custom data extraction logic. In both cases, Octoparse is based on a user-friendly interface designed to guide users throughout the data extraction process. Data extraction tasks can also be scheduled, run in the cloud, and called via API.
The post "3 Productivity Tools to Transform the Way You Work" appeared first on Writech.
Top comments (0)