In
their enthusiasm and due to lack of proper knowledge, people install software
that works as a screen or web scraper and gets them lots of information. Of
this only 10% may be actually useful and the user has to weed out unnecessary
information. What screen scrapers do is they simply extract information
available on pages displayed on computer screen, without discriminating between
that which is useful and that which is not. It requires human intervention to
evaluate the downloaded data and filter it which means investment in time and
effort. Advanced software may automate some of the processes but the package
will not crawl web pages or index data.
Data
mining, on the other hand, is an intelligent method of extracting data from
websites. It includes a crawler that visits all pages, finds selected data
according to preset filters, fetches the data, evaluates it and presents it in
a usable format, with the least amount of human intervention. It can search for
and analyze large amounts of information in a better way than simple scraping.
This software is more sophisticated and requires a lot of background
programming and inclusion of sophisticated algorithms. It is also expensive.
For
users who may be dissatisfied with their current web scraper, there is intelligent web scraper software that also works
like data mining software. In fact, it does more than mine data; it
accesses data from password protected websites and does it all anonymously
through proxy servers with rotating IP addresses, leaving no trace. That’s the
software to use for serious work.
Web Scraper Software and Data Mining Rolled Into One Package