Data mining, or as it is called, data extraction, is the process of extracting data from some website and exporting this data in some structured format. When we talk about the structured form, we mean a conditional “table” of data, or a library of the type “Key – value”. For various reasons, at some point in time, you may need to extract data from a particular website. You can do this in many ways, such as by copying the data manually, requesting the data from the site administrator, or obtaining the data through an API, and so on. However, there are many situations in which you cannot use classical ways of obtaining data, in which case you should resort to automatic data scraping with the help of special programs.
At automatic scraping of the data, first of all, it is necessary for you to adjust the program – to create the project and to specify a set of rules which would allow to receive the data from a site in the structured format. After that, the application will automatically crawl through the pages of the site, collecting data from these pages, and converting them into a structured form.
As a result, you will get a set of exported files with structured information, which you can use as you wish. Structured information can include not only some string elements, but also images, meta-files and binary files.
The advantage of using data scraping programs is the speed of obtaining the finished result. Many sites contain hundreds and thousands of pages of data, which can take years to process manually. What to speak about projects from sphere of electronic commerce – the prices for many goods vary daily.
When we talk about the fact that data scrapers are a universal tool, we really mean a wide range of opportunities for their use – you can get data from virtually any Internet page: online stores, bulletin boards, auction sites, various exchanges, cryptocurrency sites, and so on. Data scrapers – this is primarily a saving of time and money. It is a flexible tool that allows you to work with websites in a structured way.
Our project refers to native data extractors – we use a software kernel, deployed on a computer or server. Using our project, you can scrape the data from the sites you are interested in.