Web Scraping Skills
- The incredible amount of data on the Internet is a rich resource for any field of research or personal interest. To effectively harvest that data, you’ll need to become skilled at web scraping.The Python libraries requests and Beautiful Soup are powerful tools for the job. If you like to learn with hands-on examples and you have a basic understanding of Python and HTML, then this tutorial is.
- See full list on medium.com.
Mar 16, 2020 Arguably the easiest method of web scraping, no need to learn any new set of skills to perform the scraping Allows for human checks of every data point to avoid errors or skip irrelevant data records during your extraction. Web Scraping has now become a sensational service with its multiple uses in any genre or domain. Businessmen look for simpler and convenient methods to convert loads and load amount of web pages into useful and authentic data for developing their product descriptions to writing enticing content that generates more revenue for their company. Web Scraping (also called Web Crawling, Data Extraction, Screen Scraping) is the process of extracting data from multiple websites and saving it into local databases, in formats of Excel, txt, CSV and JSON. With the overwhelming data available on the internet, web scraping becomes an essential approach to aggregating Big Data.
Mastering web scraping can be incredibly valuable.
After all, web scraping will give you instant access to valuable datasets such as competitor product details, stock prices, market data, you name it!
However, web scraping might seem intimidating for some people. Specially if you’ve never done any coding in your life.
However, they are way simpler ways to automate your data gathering process without having to write a single line of code.
What is Web Scraping?
As you may already know, web scraping refers to the extraction of data from a website.
While this can be done manually, most people will use a software tool to run their web scraping jobs. Unfortunately, many of these web scraping tools will still require custom coding from the user.
Interested in learning more about web scraping? Read our in-depth guide on web scraping.
How to Scrape Data without Coding Skills
Luckily, there are many web scraping tools that are made with ease-of-use in mind.
So many in fact, that we have written a guide on what features make the best web scraping tool for your specific use case.
We obviously recommend ParseHub, a free and easy-to-use web scraper with the following features:
- User-friendly UI: ParseHub boasts a super friendly user interface. Load the website you’re looking to scrape data from and simply click on the data you’re looking to scrape.
- Works with any website: ParseHub works with any website, including modern dynamic sites that some web scrapers cannot scrape.
- Cloud-Based scraping: ParseHub only runs on your computer to build your scrape jobs, the actual scraping occurs on the cloud. That means that ParseHub does not eat up at your device’s resources while running large scrape jobs.
- Excel and JSON exports: Export your data as a CSV or JSON file, or take a step further and connect your scrape jobs to a Google Sheets document.
Want to see it in action? Here’s our video guide on how to use ParseHub to scrape any website on to an excel spreadsheet:
Web Scraping Online
What can Web Scraping be used for?
Now that you have tested out ParseHub and know how to scrape any website on to an excel spreadsheet, you might be wondering what you could use ParseHub for.
Luckily, we have written an in-depth guide on how companies use web scraping to boost their business operations.
If you’re not yet ready to tackle a complex project, try these simple project ideas to get started with web scraping.
Web Scraping With Python
Monday, February 01, 2021What is Web Scraping?
Web Scraping (also called Web Crawling, Data Extraction, Screen Scraping) is the process of extracting data from multiple websites and saving it into local databases, in formats of Excel, txt, CSV and JSON. With the overwhelming data available on the internet, web scraping becomes an essential approach to aggregating Big Data.
Who is using web scraping?
We are going to address this question by looking into different industries and jobs that require web scraping skills. To do this, we've compiled and analyzed job information extracted from job sites, including Indeed, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn.
To see exactly which jobs are using web scraping skills, we take a tech giant (Google) as an example in this research. We scraped and analyzed job postings of Google, to find out which and how many jobs are requiring web scraping skills.
Our findings are shown below. After reading them, you might be just as surprised as we were.If you are interested in the scraping process, you may want to check GitHub Repositories to download the crawlers (running at a free web scraping tool Octoparse)to get the data you want.
Finding 1: 54 Industries Are Requiring Web Scraping Skills
We scraped and analyzed job postings in different industries that require web scraping skills from LinkedIn. In total, there are jobs in 54 industries requiring web scraping skills. The top 10 industries with the highest demand for web scraping skills are Computer Software (22%), Information Technology and Services (21%), Financial Services (12%), Internet (11%), Marketing and Advertising (5%) Computer & Network Security (3%), Insurance (2%), Banking (2%), Management Consulting (2%) and Online Media(2%).
Other industries include Oil & Energy, Construction, Consumer Goods, Defense & Space, Staffing and Recruiting, Hospital & Health Care, Education Management, Nonprofit Organization Management, Pharmaceuticals, Publishing, Research, Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing, Government Administration…etc.
Finding 2: Non-tech Jobs Are Requiring Web Scraping Skills
Also based on the information extracted from LinkedIn, we found that non-tech jobs are also including web scraping in their job requirements.
Traditional wisdom has it that most jobs requiring web scraping are tech-relevant ones, like Information Technology and Engineering. There are, however, surprisingly many other kinds of jobs that require web scraping skills as well, such as sales, business development,marketing, human resources, writing/editing, and consulting.
Specifically, we explored web scraping jobs in Google, to find out how many jobs are requiring web scraping skills and what other requirements are besides web scraping.
Finding 3: Web Scraping Skills in Tech Company (Google as an example)
Since it’s pretty obvious that software and information technology companies have the highest demand for web scraping experts, we decided to dig into the job postings of Google. Job categories that need web scraping skills the most are Software Engineering, Sales & Account Management, and Program Management, followed by Technical Solutions and Marketing & Communications.
For those who are curious about other skill requirements for Software Engineer and Sales & Account Management in Google, we made the job requirements into word clouds to give you a better idea.
Requirements on Software Engineering in Google
Requirements on Sales & Account Management in Google
Besides analyzing job postings requiring web scraping skills, we also managed to look at the greater picture of all the jobs available across industries. Here is some additional information we got.
Finding 4: Top 10 Best-Paying Jobs
Based on the information aggregated from Glassdoor, there are huge differences in salaries for different jobs, which range from $25K to $203K. Among all, senior data engineers and data scientists are the best paying jobs.
（The above data is based on Glassdoor's estimate of the base salaries of the jobs, which is not necessarily endorsed by the employers. ）
Among all the job information we collected, the lowest paying jobs are Political Reporter and Junior Recruiter, starting from $25K and $29K.
Finding 5: Top 10 Best Paying Industries
We also explored the average pay across different industries, based on the same dataset extracted from Glassdoor. The industries with the highest salaries are Oil & Gas Services, Biotech & Pharmaceuticals, and General Merchandise & Superstore. Much to our surprise, Information Technology only ranks No.5 on the list.
Conclusion
It is safe to say that web scraping has become an essential skill to acquire in today’s digital world, not only for tech companies and tech positions, but also for non-tech jobs. The ability to compile large datasets is fundamental to Big Data analytics, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.
Thankfully, Big Data is becoming easier to access than ever. With automated web scraping toolsgetting smarter and more popular, even people with no programming background can easily apply web scraping for aggregating all sorts of data, empowering their business & work with the insights from Big Data.
That being said, if you wish to learn about web scraping but do not want to deal with Python or other programming languages, a web scraping tool is a great option. I've profiled a list of web scraping tools below for your reference. Among all the choices on the market, Octoparse stands out as the best FREE automatic web scraper as a solution for data extraction at scale.
How Long To Learn Web Scraping
Artículo en español: Perspectiva de Datos: 54 Industrias que Usan Web Scraping
También puede leer artículos de web scraping en el Website Oficial