It is almost close to three decades since the advent of web crawlers which was incepted in the early nineties. It has been quite a long time since web crawlers have been assisting in cutting out the chaos only to streamline data like extracting music out of noise. While, in its early days, the role of web crawlers was restricted to fetching and storing webpage statistics, with time, even these virtual bots have evolved. Today, these web crawlers are capable of not only fetching any kind of da.........

Web crawling and web scraping are often used interchangeably, but is that really the case? Maybe not.

There’s a fine line of distinction between the two concepts. To put things simply, a typical crawling function includes docking onto a webpage and tracking the relevant links while scanning through the actual text and subsequently proceeds to the next webpage and so on.

On the flipside, web scraping refers to parsing through content on a webpage and collecting partic.........

Today, the world is all about being dynamic. Change is now the only constant. With technology and communications through data, the world has not only become dynamic but is also robust. With so much of data floating around, businesses and individuals are informed alike. The wall of information asymmetry is slowly crumbling. Businesses today, take a considerable quantum of decisions based on data and analytics of numerable data sets. Large data sets lead to a heavier and more efficient form of .........

The amount of data being transmitted and shared over the internet is outstanding. Interestingly, a large chunk of the trillion-ton data ocean is not created by large corporations, but by individuals across the globe. It would be interesting to look at the statistics –

• The number of tweets have increased by almost over 25% since 2013 to over 3.5 lakh tweets every minute.
• From the period between 2013 to 2016, the number of posts shared over facebook has increa.........

Quite often many of us are so engrossed in achieving the goal that we forget about being fair in the means. Web scraping as a service is almost indispensable especially to organisations operating in a data sensitive organization. Succumbing to the pressure of being on top of the data game takes such a toll that the lines between ethical web scraping and intrusive web scraping is almost blurred. Web scraping and data extraction as services may be one of the most profitable value propositions. .........