Displaying items by tag: data scraping

Data scraping is not illegal on LinkedIn, but you must abide by certain terms and conditions before you can take action. LinkedIn is a social media platform that contains a lot of data about people around the world, and a lot of information is waiting to be unearthed. 

For example, data scraping on legal documents involving personal information is unacceptable. In other words, any action that violates LinkedIn's data scraping policy will attract a ban from their website. Read and learn how to scrape data from LinkedIn.

GUEST OPINION: Today’s world revolves around the internet, users, and the data they create. That data can be valuable to all kinds of companies and even to individuals.

They can utilize it for multiple purposes, such as finding new trends or better marketing for a particular product. Whatever the use case, gathering that data was quite challenging a few years ago. Today, techniques like web scraping and data mining exist, making this process much more manageable.

Let’s see what data scraping and mining are, including the tips on doing it efficiently and the essential tools you need.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is a technique of extracting information from websites.

You typically do it with the help of automatized scrapers that pull vast amounts of data.

Web scraping involves making requests to a server, downloading the HTML of the page, and then parsing it for analysis.

Various industries use it, such as marketing, research, sports analytics, e-commerce, real estate, and social media.

What is data mining?

Data mining comes after data extraction is complete and vast amounts of data await further analysis.

When talking about it, we usually are referring to analyzing data.

Data mining often uses scraped data, but all kinds of data are suitable for discovering patterns and making insights from extensive data sets.

It involves using methods from machine learning, database systems, mathematics, and statistics.

Large companies often use web scraping and data mining together to do market research or uncover trends for better marketing or product monetization.

Top 5 tips for efficient data scraping and mining

The most effective way to do web scraping and mining is to use scrapers, which can help automate and extract vast amounts of data from a website in a much shorter time.

What else can you do to make web scraping and mining more efficient?

Target specific data

Instead of scraping entire websites, you can limit the data you scrape. Set up your scrapers to extract only the specific information you need from a website. That will also lower the chance of overloading and crashing a website.

Store the scraped data

After scraping specific data and analyzing it, store it instead of dumping it immediately. You can use caching or databases for that purpose. That way, you don’t have to re-scrape the same website when you need information from it again.

Use a headless browser

As the internet is built using various programming languages, different websites can look quite different on various devices and browsers.

That’s why you should use headless browsers when scraping sites. By using these instead of GUI (Graphical User Interface) browsers, you avoid the possibility of pages loading and changing content dynamically.

Use a web scraping framework

Instead of configuring everything on your own, you can use a web scraping library to help you get started with web scraping. These libraries, or frameworks, can handle the low-level details of sending requests to websites and parsing the code for you.

Respect the website’s ToS

Regardless of how much specific data means to you, be patient with the server. Don’t overload it. Respect the server’s terms of service (ToS), too. Otherwise, you might end up getting an IP block. You may also use a proxy server to decrease the chances of blocking and potential bans.

Using static residential proxies for data scraping

It’s a fact that the most effective way to do web scraping and data mining is to use a proxy server. However, with so many types of proxy servers, it’s problematic to choose the right one. Fortunately, numerous tests have proven that static residential proxies, or ISP proxies, are the best for the job.

Most of us probably already know what a proxy server is, but what’s specific about ISP proxies? ISP proxies, or static residential proxies, are a combination of datacenter proxies, which are fast, and residential proxies, which are difficult to recognize.

They use IP addresses users get from ISPs (Internet Service Providers). Because of that, you and your web scrapers can appear as genuine users while extracting data without the fear of your IP address(es) getting a ban.

However, it’s important to get your proxies from a top-tier provider – one such being Oxylabs (view website) – to ensure smooth performance and security.

Conclusion

Web scraping and data mining are essential methods for individuals and large companies doing market research to improve their products. They most frequently use scrapers to accomplish these tasks. Moreover, web scraping can be more efficient by using various techniques.

Scrapers can lead to sites overloading and you getting a ban because of that. To prevent that, using a proxy server is crucial. One of the best types of proxy servers for web scraping and data mining is a static residential proxy or ISP proxy for short.

A court in the US has agreed that Washington-based DNS research tools provider DomainTools violated the NZ Domain Name Commission's terms of use.