How to Extract Data from Website: DIY, Scraping Tools or DaaS

Data extraction is no longer as time-consuming as before. The process has been made a lot simpler thanks to the numerous different data extraction tools available. You can even get dozens of premium tools for free online that will help you with your extraction project.

DIY: Using web crawlers

For the more tech savvy of us, the most flexible and customizable option would be to create their own web crawlers that can scrape the data they want, whenever they need. You can design a web crawler with the help PHP, Python, or Java, there are also so many different open source option out there for you to consider.

With this particular approach, you get to define exactly what type of data you want. You also dictate the frequency at which the data is collected. Making the whole extraction process custom to your needs. However, manual crawling can be fairly complex. Especially, if the project itself is complex so you need to invest a bit more of your time and resources to those projects.

Use of Scraping Tool

Scraping tools make the whole process of web crawling and data extraction far less easy. There are different commercial tools you can purchase and employ to do the job for you. The tool will work out all the complex problems and your developers can focus on things like core competencies rather than actually making crawlers.

Scraping tools are best used for ad-hoc projects. The work well when you have a specific group of websites you want the crawlers to gather data from. If you ask the tool to go into the open web and gather data for you, chances are it won’t do such an amazing job at it. So use it more specific jobs.

DaaS providers

DaaS stands for data as a service and you can find different companies that can provide you with the data you need by doing the extraction work for you. You can purchase the data from them and don’t have to purchase a scraping tool or develop an infrastructure to extract data yourself. You rely solely on the data that is provided by DaaS in this regard and while you do give them a guideline, you don’t have complete control over the data and how it is extracted. If you have larger data extraction projects then DaaS does prove some advantages as experts in the field will work at extracting and providing you with the data so it is more viable.