While data scraping services are becoming all the rage among small and medium business owners, there are many ways to go about implementing it for collecting the most relevant information. Most businesses prefer quick and effortless information retrieval that covers a multitude of applications in a hassle-free manner.

Here are a few methods by which such services optimize results for clients:

As an add-on feature:

There are some data scraping services that provide basic features such as detailed web activity (i.e. downloads, uploads, import and export of data) as a web browser extension. Data scraping in this case includes recording data transactions between web applications via CSV and XML files.

Other alternatives as a web browser extension include turning any website into an API without utilizing code. This is especially helpful when companies want to focus on analysing existing data and record them with visual aids like graphs.

Structured data extraction:

Data scraping services with frameworks are more complex and can extract structured data by crawling websites via HTML/XML sources. It is not enough to compile data and dump it on a client, instead it has to be tailored in a meaningful way based on specific needs.

Extraction via social media:

‍Some data scraping services specialize in extracting information from platforms such as online forums, review websites, blogs and various social media be it LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. With incremental and deep crawling techniques, sources can be regularly up-to-date and specific data can be pulled seamlessly.

Autonomous control:

‍There are many business owners who prefer independence when crafting their data scraping requirements. To meet this demand, web crawling services sometimes provide a common platform for companies to create their customized web crawling plans and collect data from any source online.

This can also include web harvesting and content extraction (e.g. search results, catalogs of products). Usually, such automated web scraping tools also have a visual editor that automatically pulls data from selected webpages from time to time.