How to Scale Your In-House Web Scraping Team - ESK Solutions
Web scraping has become an essential tool for staying relevant in this competitive and highly volatile market that does not forgive mistakes. Among the countless applications of web scraping, the following stand out: natural language processing, brand monitoring, price tracking and competitor monitoring.
Given the growing need for the ability to crawl the web, companies are now considering various ways to use scraping.
We agree that this can be a truly confusing endeavor, given that scraping is still in its infancy. We've even developed a framework to help you make an informed decision when looking for scraping solutions. Options range from "DIY" tools to fully managed web scraping solutions like ours.
However, here we will specifically talk about an in-house scraping service. One of the main challenges companies face when they build their own scraping team is the scalability and customizability of their own solution.
This is typical because web scraping is a specialized field requiring specific knowledge and technical resources. If you've somehow embarked on the challenging path of in-house data extraction, don't worry, as we are happy to share some tips to help you succeed.
Keep Your Technical Know-How Up to Date
When it comes to the web, everything is constantly changing. Standards are not fixed, and websites may use their own methods to improve user experience, which can pose a challenge for scrapers.
A good example is AJAX-based "Load More" buttons, which can be seen on many sites today. While these enhancements are great from a regular user's perspective, scrapers will find it difficult to adapt to them.
This brings us to the most important aspect of scaling your in-house web scraping capabilities: updating your technical knowledge. It is crucial to stay abreast of technical developments concerning the World Wide Web.
While this comes naturally if you have been in the field of web scraping for long enough, companies that have just built their own scraping team will have to start from scratch. Another obstacle that will likely affect the scale of your operations is the anti-bot mechanism used by websites to deter automated scraping.
If your target site aggressively blocks scrapers, you'll have to come up with workarounds: limiting request frequency to an acceptable rate, using proxy servers, mimicking real user behavior, and more.
Once you learn to handle these unforeseen challenges while web scraping, you can scale your scraping service.
Invest in a Larger Team of Scraping Specialists
We have realized that no matter how much you automate processes, web scraping (until the advent of full artificial intelligence) will always require human intervention. That is why having a large team is crucial for keeping your scraping systems operational.
Web scraping is also a time-sensitive field, so you can miss important data even if your scraper is down for just 5 minutes. However, you'll likely want to ensure that the ROI from scraping outweighs the total cost of your in-house web scraping team. This is one of the main reasons many of our clients have transitioned from using an in-house scraping team to our managed web data extraction services.
Invest in a Solid Technology Stack That Includes All Components
Although the term 'web scraping service' may seem like a simple process, there are many steps between sending requests to a server and receiving data in a usable format. Below are the necessary components of a scalable web scraping system.
1. HTTP Fetcher: It retrieves web pages from the servers of target sites. The fetcher component is a system programmed to navigate the site and retrieve the necessary pages in an ordered format. Anti-blocking mechanisms designed for the site are usually attached to the fetcher.
2. Deduplication: Ensures that the same content is not retrieved more than once. Deduplication greatly improves the quality of output by removing duplicate data points.
3. Extractor: A system for extracting URLs from external links.
4. URL Queue Manager: Queues and prioritizes URLs to be fetched and parsed.
5. Database: The place where data extracted via scraping will be stored for further processing or analysis.
Optimize Components for Maximum Scalability
The constant need to optimize the scraping infrastructure is something most companies overlook. As we mentioned earlier, the dynamic nature of the web causes scrapers to become obsolete from time to time. Keeping up with this pace and optimizing your system according to the growing complexity of the web is something that cannot be ignored.
Scraping Services - Conclusion
As you may have guessed, a scalable web scraping system must include specialized components to perform the various stages of scraping. Do not forget that your team's technical knowledge and team size will also play a huge role in how scalable your system turns out to be.
If you prefer not to face the difficulties associated with in-house scraping, you can turn to a service provider like ESK Solutions. We take responsibility for all stages of scraping and provide data in a ready-to-use format.