How to Scrape and Crawl Data from Websites Like Amazon.com and EBay
By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-12-27 12:14:00 | Word Count: 664
Say you have an e-commerce site like E-Bay or Amazon, and you sell multiple products that you get from other vendors; you have to rely on all these vendors to provide you with the product details about all items available through your site. There are a couple time consuming ways to do this.
First, you can rely on the outside vendors to provide you with the pertinent information to implement piece by piece on your own site (called product feeds), or you can visit each vendor’s site and cut and paste from the specific web pages where the product is located.
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Either of these options are a lot of work, but this information is crucial to the user who might end up buying the product. The point is, you need this information to optimize your sales, so why not do it the easy way?
Let Optimum7 provide data scraping for you. We can use techniques that will simply extract information from the web and provide information feeds for each of your products, without the need for laborious, time consuming ‘cut and paste’ or text implementation chores.
Web scraping or data crawling will search web content over the internet in a way that simulates human exploration, except that is an automated way of harvesting content. It will then bring the pertinent information back to you as structured data that you can store in a database or on a spreadsheet, and you will be able to analyze it later.
You can use this for information for online price comparisons, product information, web content Mashup, web research and web integration. We can even perform screen scraping for you for visual data to use with your products. Therefore, you can greatly enhance your online business, not only in terms of content/information feeds, but you will have all sorts of analytical data at your disposal. The information can be stored and referenced to help you make sound business decision about the management and development of your e-business.
Web crawling is similar in that it uses a sophisticated computer program that “crawls through” the World Wide Web in a methodical, systematic, automated way. These programs are sometimes referred to as spiders, ants, or web robots. They are commonly employed by search engines to provide the most relevant, up to date information.
You can use web crawling to provide automatic maintenance on your site because it can be tasked to routinely check all your links and validate your HTML code, to make sure all the underlying features on your site that users depend on are still working. It will also make a copy of all the pages it visits, usually beginning with a list of targeted URLs (called seeds) that you have amassed in your database from the previous visitors to your site. Therefore web crawling is a useful tool to help you grow your online business.
Optimum7 can take care of both web scraping and web crawling for you. Give us a call today to see how these functions can make your online business run smoother. You can call us at 1-800-736-9618.
