Have you ever heard about web scraping software as a service(SaaS)? With the advancement of technology, web scraping technique delivers information that helps many businesses to grow. Today, web scraping software as a service has become common and is used by many different business models.
What do we mean by web scraping as a service? Web scraping as a service means that the website scraping software works by extracting data online. In short, you do not need to download any software as all your web scraping activities will be conducted online. The software as a service will automatically allow you to integrate with the contents of websites and allow you to export the information in formats of your choice – Excel, CSV, MySQL, JSON, and HTML.
Often, the web scraping software as a service will allow you to extract any information you want from websites without much technical knowledge. Having a little knowledge of JavaScript, XPath, Regular Expression is a requirement to use the most web scraping software as a service ( SaaS). Using web scraping software as a service is flexible and it allows to extract information fast, filters domains and schedule web scraping.
How Does Data extraction services Work?
When using a web scraping software as a service, the online software fetch the pages web pages. The pages get processed automatically by a script. The script is responsible for extracting and formatting selected content. For the software to work, all you need is to download and configure it to follow a defined rule to extract data. Within seconds, the software could automatically do the task that could last hours or even days if done manually.
Most web scraping software as a service in the market is famous for;
- Providing proxy services
- API access and extracting cloud-based information enabling you to get real-time data.
To get the information you want, you need to send them an email and describe what exactly you want to extract. You receive scraped data automatical via mail.
Advantages of Web Scraping Software as a Service
Web scraping software a service (SaaS) is beneficial to e-commerce retailers who do not have enough cash to hire data analysts. The software helps them reduce on budget immensly. They need not programmers to help them with coding when extracting information from the internet or protect their network security.
Disadvantages of Using web Scraping Software as a Service (SaaS)
As much as using a web scraping software as a service is easy, it also faces some challenges that are avoidable. The scraped data gets stored in the database of the web scraping company hence jeopardizing on the security of data scraped.
Sometimes, the web scraping tool scrapes sensitive data – personal information and therefore may violate the regulations of data governance. Also, the web scraping software is hosted in a cloud. This makes the user not to use the tool whenever they need. In short, you cannot get data as soon as you need it.
There are many companies today that provide web scraping software as a service today. Mydataprovider Company owns a web scraping software as a service. The software can help you scrape unlimited amount of information from the web. Even better, the company provides 24/7 customer support in case you have a problem with using the software.
