What is Web Crawling?
A web crawler (also known as a crawling agent, a spider or a bot) is a tool that looks through the coding of websites and gathers information. The bot “crawls” and “scrapes” through the World Wide Web or specific URLs searching for fruitful data. Primarily, search engines (e.g. Google, Bing etc.) use web crawlers to index web pages according to their algorithms. In short, many people use web crawling to make data-driven decisions through collection and analysis.
We have built our own web crawler DataSearch!
How does Web Crawling work?
With developed automated systems, crawlers can secure efficient results using these three main steps:
1. Crawling
Crawlers search the World Wide Web or specific URLs for data and find the most valuable websites (URLs)
2. Scraping
Essentially, web scraping is the extraction of the specific required data from the crawled websites
3. Data Structuring
Finally, the extracted data is prepared in the structured format specified by the client. At Soft Surge, we take this extra step with all of our projects to ensure that clients obtain the full potential of the data.
How can Web Crawling be useful to your business?
Could your company benefit from crawling?
Collecting and using data can be a key process for businesses to maintain relevance in competitive markets. It can be painfully time-consuming to manually obtain and implement the data that you need. For this reason, we use web crawling for automated data collection, saving time and manual labour.
Some examples of business uses of the crawling service include:
- Competitor price data monitoring
Facilitates businesses, such as E-commerce, to keep updated on competitors’ asset pricing in their market field. Ultimately, this data can better inform future business decisions. - Populating listings
You can use crawling to populate listings on marketplace platforms that display content derived from other existing websites. For instance, our client work for Errandpro uses our crawling service to collect and display the relevant data to buyers from each supplier. - Market research
You can use web crawling for market research by scraping public content and wanted assets from the website’s coding. - Platforms that wish to index content/websites from other websites can benefit profoundly from efficient crawling and data aggregation. Data aggregation creates a tunnel for crawled data to be structured and displayed in the desired locations.
To demonstrate, our platform estate-searcher.com is a prime example of data crawled for real estate listings. We crawl data from estate agent websites and seamlessly implement property listings onto our custom search engine.
Conclusion
To conclude, we use crawling to gather wanted information from the internet for many reasons. This article displays how crawling is a handy tool for businesses such as E-commerce, online marketplaces and indexing websites. Furthermore, companies in any field can use crawling for price monitoring and market research to remain slick in competitive markets. Truthfully, the possibilities for data crawling are endless. By all means, we await your fresh, new ideas!