Web data extraction | In recent years, the automatic collection and structuring of data available on the web (portals, social networks, forums) have become one of the ways for organizations, based on data, to grow and enhance their competitive advantages over the competition. As experts in web data extraction, we want to highlight three main guidelines in this type of development:

Artificial intelligence and cybersecurity: new user profiles

In the last years, new types of data consumers appeared, whose interests are focused on the development of artificial intelligence as well as intelligence on cybersecurity threats.

While these two domains are growing at breakneck speed, they each have different needs for data from the web: Artificial intelligence specialists often see the web as a massive repository of natural language content, which their machine learning algorithms will gladly consume to become more robust; while cybersecurity companies (or teams) seek to scan the web to identify suspicious behavior and clues that could lead to a data breach or the illegal trading of items.

The dominance of these two players is sure to continue to consolidate, as the cybersecurity and AI industries themselves are on a clear growth trajectory. Likewise, this trend will influence how web data extraction providers, such as Scraping Pros, collect, structure, and commercialize the extracted web data.

Maturity and growing legitimacy

The legality of extracting web data that is publicly available to be legitimately collected and analyzed by third parties, even without the permission of the site owners, represents a widespread trend and one that will only continue to grow. There is a growing acceptance of web tracking as a legitimate business practice.

Although there are still providers who delete data that is conciseness not intended to be publicly available for semi-legal or simply illegal purposes, the delineation between good and bad practices becomes increasingly explicit.

Data structuring and segmentation become crucial

From a technical perspective, the ability to assemble different data structures for different types of data is becoming crucial. Today’s web is much more complex than it used to be a decade ago, as more and more parts of our lives go online. What’s more, the level of analysis that organizations want to perform is often much deeper and more complex.

Organizations that monitor and analyze the web will increasingly be looking for structured data that is easily machine-readable and can be segmented and structured according to predefined dimensions. These dimensions will need to vary according to the type of content being analyzed. For example, an e-commerce website differs a lot from an online media, and should typically be approached differently from an analytics perspective.

Beyond these three points -which must be taken into account when thinking about the future path of data extraction on the web- it is crucial to understand that the conversion of available information into useful records ready to be used, is one of the pillars of the Scraping Pro’s offering, is here to stay and to continue growing.