Web Crawling
Silk Data provides solutions and services for crawling and processing data from websites.
Time: 3 months
Project overview
Many modern businesses require fresh and reliable data about markets, competitors, and related products to make business decisions. It becomes increasingly difficult to track your competitors and be aware of the situation in the industry. Marketers and analysts spend the most precious resources - time and money, but still cannot achieve their goal - to receive and process large arrays of data rapidly. Silk Data takes this problem on itself. With the help of web crawling technology, extracting and clearing large arrays of data is a matter of a few hours.
Why use Web Crawling?
- Other ways to get reliable data immediately, work slowly and do not always give the required results
- Cost efficient
- Extremely accurate
- The obtained data can be used as the basis for Predictive Analytics or to create LegalTech solutions
Challenges Silk Data solve by Web Crawling
- Improvement of business activity (big data from customer reviews to pricing information)
- Obtaining quality leads generation
- Using when making a major investment decision
- Automating web data collection processes
Why Silk Data for Web Crawling?
- Since 2010 (10+ years of experience let us help our clients collect data for analytics and other projects)
- Optimized solutions
- Little dependence on third-party technologies
- Data collection for clients and our own projects (we also use parsing technology for our own purposes, showing that it works effectively)
Legality
One may wonder whether Web Crawling is legal since it involves collecting data that seems private. It is still a bit controversial. However, overall, if the data is available without a password and the scraping results are not used for copyright violations or to attack the web system, crawling is legal. If the information is publicly available online, no one forbids downloading and using it. In terms of the legal aspect, since 2019, obtaining data from websites that do not attempt to protect them from the public is not a violation of the law.
Our clients
Silk Data helped a big German real estate company collect a large amount of data, including information on prices, as well as some other important parameters (area, number of rooms) by using web scraping technology. With Web Crawling downloading an array of photos is not a problem.
Along with the rise in the use of Web Crawling services, the so-called crawling blockers appeared. More and more companies are reluctant or afraid to share their open data for various reasons. But this is not a problem for Silk Data either. We have developed several types of bypassing blocking, including using specialized proxies. The throttling function allows you to make flexible delays between requests and random intervals, which does not arouse suspicion.
Challenge
The client encountered a problem as they had to spend a lot of time manually searching for the necessary information. This was required as was the subsequent systematization of the collected data, which sometimes did not correspond to the completeness of the request.
Moreover, it was pretty clear that manually analyzing tens of thousands of prices, downloading millions of images, or checking updates in thousands of documents is quite complicated.
Solution
- The challenge was solved with special software that include the internal APIs of target websites.
- The solution was optimized in terms of focus on target website, launch frequency, and request processing speed.
- Of necessity, special proxy server and other methods that are dedicated to data access were used to get an approachable solution.
Results
Using the developed software helped our client significantly reduce the search time on the site and improve business activity by optimizing manual work by 23%. We guarantee comprehensive support of the project after its launch (changes in client requirements, updates on target sites).
