Parsing: how to choose the right service for data collection
The first and most important step in building a business is analyzing the competitors, the market, and the target audience. All this information can be obtained from the Internet, but manual processing of massive amounts of data takes a huge amount of time. Thanks to special automated services, the process is much faster and more effective. To do this parsing is used, which includes technological solutions for collecting information from open sources and structuring the data obtained. And such services offer different formats for data – it can be in the form of tables, links, or text.
In most cases, parsing is used to create a database of potential customers, learn about pricing in the market, study competitors, and monitor events in a particular sector or an entire country. There are various programs for collecting such data, some of them are quite difficult to use, but there are variants whose functionality is clear for the average Internet user. We are talking about an extension for a browser, such as Google Chrome.
The choice of service should be based on the tasks you set for parsing. You need to take into account the amount of data to be processed, the complexity of obtaining information, and much more. An extension for the browser will be effective if you need to analyze a relatively small amount of data, otherwise, there is a risk of getting unreliable data.
A popular option for Chrome is the WebScraper service. To make it work, you need to make minimal settings in the selectors, and everything else is done automatically. One of the advantages of the extension is the possibility of parsing from eBay or Amazon sites, where the information changes extremely quickly. WebScraper offers different pricing plans for users, which depend on the period of data storage on cloud services and the set of available features.
If WebScraper is suitable for collecting a relatively small amount of data, the Grepsr Browser Extension service, on the contrary, will suit those who want to delve deeper into the nuances of parsing. This application has an extended set of functions and allows the processing of information from a large number of sites. Setting up the program is quick and easy and a scheduler is available for regular data updates. In addition, Grepsr can be synchronized with your application, which makes getting and processing information more comfortable.
Another service is Agenty, which is useful for deep parsing and analysis of large data arrays. One of its advantages is anonymous parsing. The program allows you to make changes yourself, program new commands, and create your own scripts. Thus, the work of the service can be customized to almost any requirement.
The market offers other parsing tools that will effectively cope with specific tasks.