Website Parsing and Data Collection Hacks

Parsing remains a niche area, and only technically affluent companies dare to pursue it in-house. The ability to collect vast amounts of meaningful data from the big data repository known as the World Wide Web is extensive.

Since we specialize in extracting data from the internet using advanced search technologies, we process terabytes of data daily.

With big data come big ideas. Through website parsing, we have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of the internet. We are happy to share some deep insights we have uncovered from all the data we have worked with. Data-driven conclusions can be eye-opening, even if the ideas always existed as assumptions. Here are some profound takeaways from the zettabytes of data we have handled.

1. Most Websites Change Every Day

You may not even notice it, but virtually every site undergoes some changes daily. Patches for security issues, code management, new offerings, and design improvisations are among the most common reasons for site changes.

For humans, this is not a major issue since the changes are mostly internal and do not entirely alter how the site is interacted with. But for parsers, even a change in a class name can lead to a cascade of errors. This underscores the importance of regularly monitoring source websites during the data collection process.

2. Every Site Collects Data About You

This may not come as a surprise, but the scale and depth of data collection will undoubtedly raise an eyebrow if you learn about it. E-commerce sites, social media platforms, search engines, and literally any site where you can create a profile and become a member collect and treat your data as a valuable asset.

For example, Facebook reportedly saves everything you type in the status field, even if you do not post the status but delete the text. Unsurprisingly, data is becoming increasingly important in this competitive market, and everyone wants more of it.

However, this is not always a bad thing; that’s why it is okay to let technology know you better.

3. About 60% of Websites Have Serious Security Vulnerabilities

It is said that people who are well informed about online security issues use the weakest security measures. Not sure if that is true, but we have found serious security vulnerabilities on nearly 60% of web pages.

This could mean these sites are vulnerable to various types of attacks that could compromise user data, such as passwords and credit card details. It is illogical to expect all these sites to fix these issues immediately and provide you with a safer online experience. If you still use a common password for all the sites you use, now is the time to get enlightened and change them all.

4. Blocking Bots Leads to Lower Traffic and Engagement

Many sites block parser bots and automated scraping using robots.txt or TOS pages. Some even go as far as using bot detection tools for aggressive bot blocking, which is certainly a futile and rather humbling measure.

Being a good bot, we respect their choice and leave them alone. But based on our observations, these sites end up being less popular compared to their competitors. The reason is that data collection indeed contributes to a significant share of the exposure a site receives in the long run.

Many content aggregators crawl sites to obtain snippets or summaries of your web pages and display them with a backlink to the source. Over time, these links can help your site gain the traffic and search engine presence it deserves. The takeaway: Use bot-blocking mechanisms only if you want to slide downhill. By blocking bots, you are going against the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web.

5. Most Websites No Longer Have All Content in the Source Code

A decade ago, most sites had all their content in the page source code. This typically meant loading the entire page content every time a user reloaded it, since caching was not possible. It was also a nightmare for developers who had to deal with that messy code.

Since then, coding practices have changed significantly, and most websites now follow best practices such as asynchronous script loading, avoiding inline CSS, and so on. Writing scripts for data extraction would have been easier with old conventions, but we appreciate and embrace the positive changes happening on the internet.

In Conclusion

Data certainly does not lie. So, it is time to use these insights we encountered while extracting large amounts of data to improve your websites.

Some of them may help you spot unnoticed flaws in your site and fix them to make the internet better for everyone. The internet, as a collection of websites owned by various organizations, has its share of shortcomings, and we may have to live with that.