In today’s technological world, websites have become an indispensable aspect. The rate at which they are progressing over the years has been phenomenal.
Moreover, the demand for data extraction through websites is rapidly increasing across various industries. Companies require data for diverse purposes, such as acquiring new customers, tracking industry trends, business analysis, understanding government regulations, and more.
So what are the opportunities and downsides for this wanting to extract web data?
What we have for today
As per a case study published by IBM regarding Big Data analytics, the present situation reveals the following:
- There are over 1 billion Google searches taking place daily and more than 294 billion emails being sent every day.
- Trillions of sensors are constantly monitoring, tracking, and exchanging information, thereby enriching the Internet of Things with real-time data.
- Facebook is managing 30+ petabytes of user-generated data, while Twitter is handling more than 230 million tweets every day.
Over one billion websites, according to Internet Livestats, are on the Internet, which clearly indicates the exponential rate at which websites are being added every second.
Common obstacles
The growth of high-volume data, commonly known as “Big Data,” presents several challenges in terms of extracting, managing, and tracking the necessary web data for productive use.
- Obtaining data from secure and reliable websites at a faster rate for online research is the primary obstacle.
- Additionally, the process’s speed, consistency, and reliability are also at stake, and overlooking them can result in redundancy.
- Processing large volumes of data manually is inefficient and becomes increasingly difficult.
Organizations are automating web data extraction to overcome these challenges, and many are finding innovative solutions to achieve reliable automation. Automation is particularly beneficial for harvesting structured information with specific data types. It monitors changes in website structure, providing access to the desired data at the desired intervals.
This approach leads to a reduction in redundancy and eliminates manual errors and cost overheads. The extraction tools can consistently handle high volumes of data of various types, resulting in more precise and reliable web data extraction.
Disparate systems quickly consume the structured data collated from various websites.
Opportunities
The opportunities for data extraction are vast and varied across industries:
- a healthcare company would require the latest information on industry trends and government regulations;
- a retail firm would focus on competitor pricing.
The key to success lies in understanding each customer’s unique needs and providing data efficiently and in the most user-friendly way possible.
As data extraction requirements continue to increase exponentially in the coming years, the web data extraction industry will evolve rapidly, introducing various new technologies.
Customization will be the key to success, and data extraction platforms will become the need of the hour. These platforms must cater to a wide range of clients and integrate seamlessly with their existing systems, including web analytics, CRM, and marketing automation.
Using AI, data visualization, and various forms of analytics, such as text and image-based, customers will be able to make sense of the vast amount of data extracted from the web.
The potential for data extraction is immense, and businesses that leverage these opportunities effectively will gain a competitive advantage in their respective industries.