FAQs

Get answers to most common questions about our service and processes.

Introduction to Web Scraping

What is Web Scraping? +
Web scraping is an efficient method of collecting unstructured and structured data using automated tools and resources. It helps organize data in formats for easier analysis and optimization.
What is web scraping used for? +
Web scraping is used to gather publicly available web data to generate valuable strategies, competitor analysis, industry trends, customer sentiment analysis, pricing strategies, etc.
Is it legal to conduct web scraping? +
Yes, scraping publicly available data is generally legal. However, it is essential to handle it responsibly by following all legal guidelines and ethical concerns.

Web Scraping Tools & Techniques

Can you scrape websites with JavaScript, PHP, or MySQL, and what tools are used? +
Yes, you can scrape websites using JavaScript (Node,js with Puppeteer, Cheerio), PHP (cURL, Simple HTML DOM,) and MySQL for storing scraped data. Node.js is great for dynamic sites, while PHP works well for simple HTML parsing.
How do I choose the best web scraping services in the USA for business needs? +
Choosing the right web scraping services in the USA depends on multiple factors including:
  • Experience & Expertise: Hire companies with proven expertise in data scraping industry for eg. e-commerce, real-estate, travel, etc.
  • Scalability: Make sure that the data scraping service provider can manage small-scale and large-scale data extraction as per your requirement.
  • Customization & Flexibility: The best services offer custom solutions customized as per particular data requirements, and not just APIs.
  • Compliance & Legality: Ensure that the provider follows ethical scraping practices and complies with the data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.
  • Data Quality: Clean, structured, and usable data is more important than data quantity.

Legality & Ethics

Can I scrape a public website? +
Yes, you can easily scrape publicly available data from a public website, but there are few rules to follow:
  • Legal Considerations: While public data is accessible, scraping it can still raise legal concerns if it violates the website’s terms of services.
  • Ethical Scraping: It is best to respect robots.txt, avoid overloading servers, and credit sources if required.
  • Best Practices: Use rate-limiting, retries, and user-agent rotation. Also, always check the website’s policy or ask for permission if possible.
Is it legal to scrape government websites and make traffic or money with their data? +
Legality depends on the site’s terms of service and local laws. Scraping government websites can be illegal if it violates data privacy laws or terms of use. Using government data for commercial purposes without permission can lead to legal issues.
Do Amazon, Flipkart allow scraping of their reviews data? +

Amazon and Flipkart do not allow scraping of their platforms as per their terms of service. They explicitly prohibit automated access unless you use their official APIs.

However:

  • Several companies do extract reviews for analysis using custom scrapers.
  • If you decide to scrape, do so responsibly and be aware of potential risk such as IP bans or legal consequences.
  • For safer and scalable extraction, many rely on third-party data providers who manage these complexities while ensuring compliance.

Make sure to check the updated terms of use before scraping, and consider using Amazon product advertising API or Flipkart’s API where applicable.

E-Commerce & Price Monitoring

What are the benefits of using price monitoring or competitor price tracking tool? +
Using price monitoring or competitor price tracking tool provides several benefits including:
  • Market Insights: Track competitors pricing strategies to understand market insights and enhance pricing policies.
  • Dynamic Pricing: Analysis of competitor pricing strategies in real-time helps to maximize sales and profits.
  • Identify opportunities: Identify gaps in competitor pricing to place your products profitably.
  • Boost Customer Retention: Offer competitive prices to enhance customer loyalty.
  • Stay Competitive: React quickly to price changes in the market, ensuring you stay ahead of the competitors.
What is the best way to scrape Amazon for product data? +

What you need and want will determine the best way to scrape Amazon product data. Here are a few of the most widely used techniques:

Using a web scraping tool: Both free and paid web scraping programs are widely available. You may automate the Amazon data scraping process with the aid of these tools.

  • Using an API: You can programmatically retrieve product data through Amazon's API. If you need to access data that isn't on the public website or if you need to scrape a lot of data, this can be a suitable choice.

    Using a browser extension: A variety of browser extensions are available for use in the process of scraping product information from Amazon. These extensions might not be as strong as web scraping programs, but they are usually simpler to set up.

    When scraping data from Amazon's website, it's crucial to abide by their terms of service regardless of the approach you take. Scraping that breaches user privacy or is used for commercial purposes is prohibited by Amazon.

    Here are some more ideas for extracting product information from Amazon:

    • You will need to utilize a proxy server to conceal your IP address.
    • By doing this, Amazon may be less likely to reject your requests.
    • To further hide who you are, use a rotating proxy server.
    • Establish a lag time between queries. This will lessen the likelihood that Amazon will believe you are a bot.
    • Scrape data in little amount at a time. By doing this, you can lessen the likelihood that Amazon will limit your requests.

    You can scrape product data from Amazon without breaking their terms of service by using these pointers. Check out some advantages and disadvantages of each web scraping method:

  • Web Scraping Tool:

    Advantages

    • With this tool, it is possible to scrape a lot of data.
    • Can be used to obtain information not found on the open website.
    • Powerful than browser add-ons.

    Disadvantages

    • Setup may be more challenging than with browser extensions.
    • Some coding skills might be necessary.

  • API:

    Advantages

    • Simple to assemble.
    • Need no prior experience of coding.
    • Has the ability to access a large range of data.

    Disadvantages

    • Can cost more than tools for web scraping.
    • Rate limitations can apply.

  • Browser Extension:

    Advantages

    • Simple to assemble
    • Need no prior experience of coding.
    • It is free to use.

    Disadvantages

    • It is limited to data scraping from public websites.
    • Might not be as strong as APIs or web crawling technologies.

How do I scrape Google Shopping prices? +
Strong anti-scraping methods make it difficult to scrape Google Shopping pricing data. Hence using headless browsers such as Puppeteer or Selenium is suggested to collect pricing information and mimic human behaviour. However, Google often modifies its structure and disables IPs that scrape too frequently.
How can I scrape eCommerce websites? +
To extract data from an eCommerce website, the user will need to know the main requirements like prices, product names, etc. After then, Python libraires like BeautifulSoup, Selenium, Scrapy are used to extract the required data from the e-commerce websites. Before initiating the scraping process, it is necessary to check the robots.txt or terms of services of the website.

Grocery & Food

What are the challenges of data scraping in the grocery and food industry? +
There are various challenges in scraping food and grocery data. There are several websites that frequently update prices and item availability frequently and so staying updated with the latest trend is difficult. Few of the websites prefer to use anti-bot tools like CAPTCHAs and JavaScript to extract data from heavy pages. The other major challenge is gathering structured data from dynamic content like menu or other options like flavors, size, etc. Because different platform shows information differently hence creating a structured format requires lot of efforts.
What is online food delivery app data scraping? +
Online food delivery app data scraping refers to the automated extraction of the data from platforms like Zomato, Swiggy, UberEats or DoorDash. This data includes:
  • Restaurant listings & Menu items
  • Pricing
  • Food categories
  • Ratings & Reviews
  • Delivery fees
  • Offers and discounts
  • Operational hours and geolocation data

Businesses use this data for competitor analysis, price monitoring, market research, trends spotting, and restaurant performance tracking.

Travel

How can the travel industry benefit from data scarping? +
Travel companies can leverage data scraping services to monitor competitor prices, check hotel availability, track flight deals and customer reviews. The scraped data from multiple travel websites helps agents to create a competitive-edge in the travel industry and enhance their offerings. Also, the travel data will assist travel agents to monitor seasonal trends, most-popular destinations, and user sentiment analysis. Using the data it becomes easy to make data-driven decisions and customize the services.
Can you scrape data from a car rental app? +
Yes, it is possible to scrape data from a car rental app, but while scraping the car rental data it is necessary to strictly adhere to its legal and ethical standards. Using web scraping tools or APIs, it becomes easy to extract data including car availability, rental prices, and locations. However, you must ensure that you have the app’s permission or that the scraping aligns with their terms of services to avoid legal issues. Also, few of the car rental services offer their official APIs making it easy to scrape data reliably and lawfully.
What are the friendliest sites for web scraping Car rental listings? +
Some of the friendliest websites for scraping car rental listing data includes Kayak, rentalcars.com, etc. These platforms deliver structured HTML layouts, which makes it easy to extract data like car models, prices, locations, and availability. However, it is necessary to review their robots.txt file and terms of services to ensure its compliance with their policies.

Real Estate

How do you web scrape real estate data? +
To extract real-estate data from multiple websites like Zillow, Realtor, or property listing. Leveraging data scraping tools like Scrapy and Selenium delivers data like costs, location, size, facilities, and agent data. Managing pagination and filters correctly is crucial. Many websites also contain location-based data, thus if access is restricted by region, geolocation tools or proxies could be useful.
Which are the most excellent ways to scrape real estate data from niche websites? +
The best ways to scrape real-estate data from targeted websites include using custom web scrapers and APIs. Scraping Intelligence provides automated real estate data extraction services, collecting property listings, prices, locations and agent details in real-time.

Social Media & Sentiment Analysis

How do you efficiently scrape social sentiment web data like tweets, reddit data, etc.? +
Efficiently scraping social sentiment web data like tweets, reddit data requires APIs and web scraping tools. Twitter API and Reddit API provide structured access to posts, comments, and metadata. For large-scale scraping, tools like Scraping Intelligence can streamline data extraction process.
What is the importance of scraped social media data? +
Scraped social media data is important for businesses, researchers, and marketers to gain actionable insights:
  • Audience Analysis: Understanding user behavior, interests, and demographics to create targeted campaigns.
  • Trend Monitoring: Identify emerging trends, hashtags, and viral content.
  • Competitor Analysis: Tracking competitor’s performance and strategies.
  • Sentiment Analysis: Monitoring public opinions about brands, products, or events.
  • Content Optimization: Analyzing engagement metrics to customize effective content.

B2B Lead Generation

What's the best tool to scrape B2B leads data from LinkedIn for boosting B2b sales? +
Website Scraper is considered the best tools to scrape B2B leads data from LinkedIn till now. These tool assists to extract data like job title, company names, and contact details. However, LinkedIn’s policy prohibits unauthorized scraping, hence it is necessary to follow their terms of services and guidelines to get high-quality data within ethical and legal boundaries.