For all kinds of companies, both data collection and analysis are rapidly becoming an inseparable part of the decision-making process. Thanks to a technique called web scraping, today this data is typically collected from publicly available online sources, such as search engines or e-commerce websites. Let’s take a quick look at the purpose of web data collection, the hassles of doing it in-house, and how Oxylabs Real-Time Crawler will help you get the data you need without making your head spin.
Boost Your Business with Oxylabs Real-Time Crawler
So, first of all, why is web scraping a big deal? The answer is simple. Business decisions made without solid evidence to back them up are most often just a gamble. On the contrary, having up-to-date quality data enables companies to function much more precisely. After analyzing the collected data, they gain actionable insights that help them make decisions and stay competitive, thus making web scraping incredibly useful. But, as with most good things in life, there’s a catch – doing it in-house, in most cases, is simply not worth it and that’s why Oxylabs Real-Time Crawler comes to the rescue. But what exactly are we talking about?
Real-Time Crawler is a game-changing heavy-duty data extraction tool. In fact, by ensuring 100% delivery from any search engine or e-commerce website, it is the most powerful web data collection tool out there. It’s built to make it as simple as possible for clients to get the data they need. Thanks to its API, there’s only one step – just make a request by specifying your target and the type of data, and get the result back either in raw HTML or as parsed data, formatted in JSON. It really is that easy.
In a nutshell, Oxylabs Real-Time Crawler provides these benefits:
- 100% success rate guaranteed
- Perfect for difficult targets
- Highly customizable
- Effortless integration
- Get data in real-time or via callback
- Receive ready to use parsed data
- No need to manage proxies on your ownIntegrated captcha solver
- Virtually unlimited scalability
One of the most convincing features of Oxylabs Real-Time Crawler is its ability to be used for tasks of varying scale. So whether you want to scrape 1000 pages a month or 1 billion, it’s ready to get to work and adapt to your needs. And since you’ll only pay for the number of pages scraped, this is the most cost-effective solution, because it means avoiding sinking money into maintaining a huge pool of proxies or a dedicated web scraping team which you might not always utilize fully.
Oxylabs Real-Time Crawler is perfect for:
- Pricing intelligence: Stay ahead of the game by keeping track of the market and your competitors by getting live pricing data.
- SEO monitoring: Super charge your SEO efforts by extracting SERP data, search volume or ranking data for any keyword.
In-house web scraping – Not for the Faint-Hearted
Still not convinced and would like to try starting your own web scraping operation? Well, there are quite a few compelling reasons to avoid doing so. Let’s take a look at some of them.
It is complex, requires a dedicated team and is costly
Despite its usefulness, web scraping is still a technically complicated operation. If carried out in-house, it requires a dedicated team with specialized know-how and experience. Then, of course, there’s the cost of purchasing and maintaining the technical infrastructure. You may only need to scrape the web occasionally, so this might be likened to building your own road to a destination you will only visit a few times a year. And the fun doesn’t end here.
It’s an uphill battle even if you’re doing everything right
The most popular websites to scrape, especially search engines and e-commerce sites, do their best to guard their websites from such automated activities. Their built-in protection is getting more sophisticated with each passing day. This means that even if you have the infrastructure in place, the success of your efforts is far from guaranteed. And due to it being a cat-and-mouse game, it’s very likely to just become a continuous struggle. Oxylabs Real-Time Scraper, on the other hand, guarantees 100% success no matter what.
There are legal risks
Web scraping is not your regular tech operation since, by some, it is considered intrusive and hostile. And while some sites take no issue with it, others protest, explicitly forbidding it in their Terms of Service and Robots.txt. Web crawling should also be done while keeping in mind certain best practices, such as not overloading your target’s servers with too many frequent requests, which almost always ends up in getting a chunk of your rented proxies blocked. Offloading these kinds of risks is just one of the reasons to let Oxylabs Real-Time Crawler take care of everything.
It distracts from your core business
Even if you have the will and the resources to carry out web scraping in-house, putting so much effort into a single operation could be considered an overkill. What’s more, the constant required attention might actually end up causing more harm than good because each moment spent on solving issues not directly related to your business is essentially a moment wasted.
Only the most experienced and professional companies, possessing the highest amount of know-how, knowing from years of experience all the technical details and subtleties, make it possible to provide web data collection as a convenient ready-to-use service.
So if you’re ready to give it a try, visit Oxylab’s website or simply drop them a line at hello@oxylabs.io
