Data Science and Web Scraping
Introduction
Today's world now includes a significant amount of data science. To assist in the development of their goods and services, many large IT businesses have data scientists on their staff. Data science enables businesses to continually produce cutting-edge goods that people will buy and are worth millions or perhaps billions of dollars. Virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google have revolutionized consumer lifestyles.
In this article, we'll talk about web scraping and how it can advance data science.
About Web Scraping
The process of extracting data from a webpage is known as web scraping. This data is gathered and then exported in a way that the user will find more valuable. A spreadsheet or an API, for example. Online scraping may be carried out in a variety of methods, including manually (simple copy/paste), using bespoke scripts, or through web scraping solutions like ParseHub.
Web scrapers may collect all the information from specified websites or the specific information a user requests. It's ideal if you describe the data you want so that the web scraper only swiftly retrieves that information. For instance, you could want to scrape an Amazon website to find out what kinds of juicers are offered, but you might just need information on the models of the various juicers and not the feedback from customers.
Therefore, the URLs are initially supplied when a web scraper wants to scrape a website. Then, all of the websites' HTML code is loaded. A more sophisticated scraper may also extract all of the CSS and Javascript parts. The scraper then extracts the necessary data from this HTML code and outputs it in the manner that the user has chosen. The data is often stored as an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file, but it is also possible to save it in other forms, such as a JSON file.
Web scraping, however, is often not an easy operation. Web scrapers differ in functionality and features since websites come in a wide variety of designs and sizes. The information obtained by web scraping can be used for a variety of purposes, including:
Competitor Analysis: Gain insight into how your rivals are valuing their goods or discover the keywords they are using.
Industry Insights: To gauge how well a specific industry is doing, you may scrape articles, stocks, and prices.
Lead Generation: A lot of web scrapers use internet directories to discover companies in their target market and build a list of people to contact.
Data Collection for Research: You can scrape various big data websites and libraries to get the information you need for your project. Then, you can export it to a file.
Financial Data: Such kind of data may be scraped, including stock prices, income statements, balance sheets, and stock news.
Relation between Data Science and Data Scraping
Web scraping is a crucial skill for data scientists to have since it makes the process of collecting web data more effective. Many data scientists will utilize a web scraper to aid them as data science involves gathering internet information. Both automatic and manual web scraping are possible, although automated web scrapers will do the task more quickly and efficiently.
There is a large amount of publicly accessible data that may be used in data science. DAta.gov Data Description, Amazon, and other big data portals and libraries You may take data from public data sets and link it to your topic. E-commerce websites may be scrapped for information on product development. To find product data, websites like Amazon, Walmart, and eBay may be scraped.
Any website that is relevant to your study can provide data that you can use. Take the case when you wish to investigate the characteristics of the ideal product. To find out what customers like and hate about particular items, you may scrape customer reviews and arrange your data afterwards. Additionally, some businesses and software developers will build their own web scrapers from the ground up. Such is the significance of web scraping for data science.
Conclusion
An essential component of data science is web scraping. It was one of the numerous tools you would require to properly and efficiently collect web data. Web scraping can facilitate the initial task of data collection, which is one of the first steps in data analysis. Skillslash, one of the most profound ed-tech platforms, has made learning new technology, like web scraping, possible by dint of the amazing features and courses that they offer. Such as, the Cloud Computing & IoT course with certification course, Data Science course in Bangalore with Real Work Experience etc. So, explore these domains, and make it possible for you to grow with the help of Skillslash.