Debunking Myths About Web Scraping

Web scraping and big data are becoming crucial catalysts for business success across all industries. I believe that competitive intelligence and business information derived from scraped data are too valuable to ignore.

Given the massive volume of data available today, there is no question of collecting this data without the help of an automated scraping solution. What prevents businesses from adopting web scraping technologies? Limited skills? Resources? Awareness of the solution? Or is it the myths surrounding scraping?

Let's try to debunk the most common myths about website scraping and clarify our understanding of the scraping solution.

Myth 1: Web scraping is illegal

Many companies may have the notion that scraping is a "black hat," illegal activity that must be done while looking over one's shoulder.

This is completely false. To give you some perspective, Google is nothing but a huge scraper that crawls all websites that do not block bots with robots.txt.

Of course, there are ethical norms and best practices to follow when scraping websites. Sites that have blocked scrapers via robots.txt or have a TOS page stating they do not approve of scrapers should not be crawled.

Thus, there is a legal zone for automated data collection. Moreover, scraping a website is as legal as visiting it with a web browser. You can refer to our previous article, where we detailed whether web scraping is legal.

Myth 2: The parser generates useful data

A scraper can iterate over a set of source websites, extract predefined data from them, and save it to a dump file. This does not guarantee the quality and usability of the extracted data file.

In reality, initially collected data often contains noise and duplicate records. By noise, we mean unwanted elements that were gathered along with the needed data.

A website scraping service must further process this data to convert it into a usable format. Deduplication, cleaning, and formatting are stages necessary to prepare data for analytical applications.

If you expect the scraper to provide clean, structured data out of the box, sorry to disappoint.

Myth 3: Data scraping setups are robust and universal

In reality, scraping scripts are very fragile, but this is not because they are poorly coded. The internet is constantly changing, and websites often modify their design and structure.

These changes cause scrapers programmed for the previous version of the site to break. Believing in scraper robustness will only lead to data loss. This does not mean you cannot get a continuous data stream—you can if you use a reliable scraping service.

A good scraping solution provider will regularly monitor target websites for structural changes and adjust the collection settings accordingly.

If you don't want to live in constant agony over maintenance, it's easier to use scraping services.

There is no such thing as a universal scraper, unless the data you need is truly generic in nature. Each website differs in structure, making scrapers unable to be universal.

Myth 4: Scrapers can crawl the entire internet

Many people believe that scrapers have the superpower to crawl and collect the entire world wide web. Unfortunately, this is not feasible in practice.

If you need data from the internet, you must know where that data is available. The sites from which you need data are called sources or donors.

The first step in the website scraping process is identifying the sources. Scraping scripts are written exclusively for source sites, so there is no question of crawling and scraping the entire internet.

Since websites do not have a universal structure, it is impossible to write a scraping script that can handle multiple websites.

Myth 5: Scraping can be used to collect email contacts

Scraping is an extremely powerful tool for extracting any data from the internet. This includes email addresses and contact information. There is a common misconception that using scraping to collect email contacts can help with lead generation. However, this is only true in theory.

While you can collect publicly available emails from the internet, contacts obtained via scraping are less likely to be useful for your business. Emails sourced from the internet will be less targeted and often redundant, with people having opted out.

Summary

As the business world actively leverages big data and scraping technologies, it's time to better understand what lies at the core of this technology. Clearing up these misconceptions will help you move a step ahead in using scraping to obtain critical data for your business and ultimately achieve success.

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