Large-Scale Web Scraping — Web Scraping at Scale
The Internet is a vast place. There are billions of users who produce immeasurable amounts of data daily. Retrieving this data requires a great deal of time and resources.
To make sense of all that information, we need a way to organize it into something meaningful. That is where large-scale web scraping comes to the rescue. It is a process that involves gathering data from websites, particularly those with large amounts of data.
What Is Large-Scale Web Scraping?
Large Scale Web Scraping is scraping web pages and extracting data from them. This can be done manually or with automated tools. The extracted data can then be used to build charts and graphs, create reports and perform other analyses on the data.
It can be used to analyze large amounts of data, like traffic on a website or the number of visitors they receive. In addition, It can also be used to test different website versions so that you know which version gets more traffic than others.
3 Major Challenges In Large Scale Web Scraping
Large-scale scraping is a task that requires a lot of time, knowledge, and experience. It is not easy to do, and there are many challenges that you need to overcome to succeed.
1. Performance
Performance is one of the significant challenges in large-scale web scraping.
The main reason for this is the size of web pages and the number of links resulting from the increased use of AJAX technology. This makes it difficult to scrape data from many web pages accurately and quickly.
2. Web Structure
Web structure is the most crucial challenge in scraping. The structure of a web page is complex, and it is hard to extract information from it automatically. This problem can be solved using a web crawler explicitly developed for this task.
3. Anti-Scraping Technique
Another major challenge when you want to scrape the website at a large scale is anti-scraping. It is a method of blocking the scraping script from accessing the site.
Getting To Know The Client Expectations And Needs
We collect all the data from our clients to analyze the feasibility of the data extraction process for every individual site. If possible, we tell our clients exactly what data can be extracted, how much can be extracted, to what extent it can be extracted, and how much time the process completes.
Constructing Scrapers And Assembling Them Together
For every site allotted to us by our clients, we get a unique scraper built in place so that no one scraper has the burden to go through thousands of sites and millions of data. Moreover, all those scrapers are working in tandem for work to be done rapidly.
Running The Scrapers By Executing Them Smoothly
It is essential to have the servers and Internet lease lines running all the time so the extraction process is not interrupted. We ensure this through high-end hardware present at our premises costing lacs of rupees so that real-time information is delivered after extraction whenever the client wants. To avoid any blacklisting scenario, we already have proxy servers, many IP addresses, and various secret strategies coming to our rescue.
Quality Checks Scrapers Maintenance Performed On A Regular Basis
After the the automated web data scraping process, we ensure manual quality checks on the extracted or mined data via our QA team, who constantly communicates with the developer’s team for any bugs or errors reported. Additionally, if the scrapers need to be modified per changing site structure or client requirements, we do so without any hassle.
Final Thoughts
So, here you have learned everything about large-scale web scraping, from challenges to some of the best practices of web scraping at scale.
We have covered all the topics in this article, so we hope you have learned something new. Now it is time to apply what you have learned and start scraping data from the Web independently.
Be careful to use all technology sparingly because many different tools are available today, each with pros and cons. So, choose your tool wisely, depending on your needs.
