The same question keeps coming back – is web scraping easy?
The answer to that question is a resounding YES! Web scraping is easy! Anyone without any knowledge of coding can scrape data if they are given the right tool. There’s no reason you can’t scrape the data you need because of programming. There are various tools, such as Octoparse, designed to help non-programmers scrape websites for wanted data.
What is Web Scraping
Web scraping is simply the process of obtaining data from a website. You can program it manually or use a web scraping tool to automate it.
With all that said, our main question is still left unanswered – is web scraping easy? Don’t worry! You will get answers soon.
Web Scraping Use Cases
The data obtained from websites can be used for various purposes. Here are some common ways that people apply web scraping in their business and study.
Monitoring Competitors
Date monitoring plays an essential role in the e-commerce industry. It can be used to monitor competitors, track product prices, understand customers’ sentiments, get a general overview of the market, etc. For retailers that what to sell online, it can help them to find the best products to sell, locate the ideal platforms to launch their businesses, and modify their strategies.
Information Congregation
Any information aggregators need a large amount of data as the foundation. Whether you want to create a real estate website, sports website, job aggregator, or maybe a news website, you would need to collect data from a variety of websites. To this extent, web scraping can be a very valuable tool.
By employing a powerful web scraping method, you can scrape thousands of rows of data from multiple sites and transmit it into structured formals, regardless of the complex website structures.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is a helpful way to understand how consumers perceive the products or services they purchased, what they need, and what they care about most. Businesses can use it to improve their products, services, and overall customer satisfaction.
However, conducting sentiment analysis requires a lot of text as raw materials. Here is where web scraping comes in. Web scraping can help you get people’s reviews, ratings, and comments from diverse platforms like social media and online shopping platforms that allow you to develop an insightful understanding of customers’ sentiments about your products and services.
What’s more, web scraping can be used in any industry for different uses. Here are some popular examples for reference, and you can download the web scraping infographic made by Octoparse.
Now, let’s look back to the original question of this post: Is web scraping easy? Yes, and we’ll give more details about how to do it easily in the following part.
How to Scrape Web Data Easily
There are two common methods of scraping data – using Python or JavaScript and web scraping tools.
Scrape data using Python and JavaScript
Python is one of the most common coding languages that people use to scrape data. With tools and libraries like BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, and so on, you can build a web scraper using Python. For experts in coding, these frameworks make the coding process simpler. It can be challenging for someone without coding knowledge. There is a big learning curve for them to learn about using Python, and the process must be time-consuming. But if you have a clear and helpful step-by-step guide on how to scrape data with Python, you can also master it soon!
Using Web Scraping Applications
For non-tech savvy people who are still left in the dark with questions like Is web scraping easy, and how can I scrape data if I can’t code? Your answer lies with web scraping applications which are designed for anyone regardless of coding skills.
These tools make the data scraping process easy and visualize that users can build scrapers with a few clicks rather than writing a single line of code. Here are some common web scraping tools that we recommend.
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is a cloud-based web crawler that helps you extract web data easily without coding. With the help of Octoparse, you can scrape data from all sorts of websites and turn pages into structures, whether the website structures are simple or complex. When building scrapers using Octoparse, you can select the wanted data fields on the page by clicking on them or launching the auto-detection process to let Octoparse select the extractable data for you. Only within a few clicks, you can build scrapers based on particular needs yourself.
Octoparse provides many advanced features like scheduled extraction that lets you get up-to-date data frequently automatically, and auto IP rotation to avoid being blocked by the websites you scrape. You can have a 14-day trial period, and experience the more powerful web scraping features now.
2. Parsehub
ParsHub is another tool that can help you scrape websites without any need to write code. It can scrape data from complex websites. It also provides features like clicking to extract elements on the pages, scheduled extraction, and IP rotation. But it has a limitation of pages per run. For example, free users can only scrape 200 pages per run.
3. Zyte
Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) is a great tool that provides users with a four-step solution architecture process. So users can better plan their web scraping projects. It can convert an entire website into organized data that you can use for whatever you want.
Besides the tools we mentioned, there are many other web scraping tools available now. You can check out the list of the TOP 20 tools for extracting data quickly to see which one is the best tool for your need.
Octoparse as a SaaS Solution
For those who still ask if web scraping is easy, Octoparse as a SaaS solution can be the final answer. With Octoparse, you can automatically integrate the content from websites easily and export scraped data in various formats like Excel, CSV, JSON, or even databases like Google Sheets. You don’t need to know how to code either technical knowledge scrape, but only simple steps to get the data you want.
SaaS and Data Services
Octoparse provides you with a wide variety of web scraping solutions. You can filter domains, schedule data extraction, and speed up the extraction. Octoparse also provides proxy services, cloud-based extraction, API access, etc., making the web scraping process easy and seamless.
Strengthen Octoparse SaaS ability to deal with a variety of websites
With Octoparse, you can rest assured that no matter the website’s complexity or the amount of data contained on the website, Octoparse will scrape the website successfully. If there is someone who asks you about is web scraping easy? You can confidently tell them that it’s thanks to the Octoparse SaaS solution, now web scraping is a piece of cake. The tool can help you extract different types of data with ease.
Cloud service
Octoparse has a series of cloud servers that allow you to extract data on the cloud 24/7. When you hand over your web scraping tasks to the cloud servers, you can scrape data at a high speed and save a lot of space on your device compared with running on your local computer. Scraped data will be saved to the cloud and can be accessed at any time.
API
Octoparse offers API connections that can send scraped data and constant updates directly to your designated database. You don’t have to manually go to the software to download your data. You can simply schedule how often you want the data exported to your in-house database.
Wrap-up
Now let’s look back to the organic question of this post, Is web scraping easy? In short, the answer is of course as long as you have the right tools to extract data. Octoparse offers an easy-to-use solution that makes web scraping simple, smooth, and fun. You, too, can scrape the web regardless of coding skills because Octoparse has you covered.
