Rethink Web Harvesting and Scraping

THINK
AHEAD
SCRAPE.IT PRESENTS
A WHITEPAPER TO HELP YOU RETHINK
WEB SCRAPING
© Scrape.it 2015
https://scrape.it
support@scrape.it
© Scrape.it 2015. Website: https://scrape.it Email: support@scrape.it

Choose An Outcome
Your company needs data from API-less websites
to give you valuable insight and actionable
business decisions. How you go about acquiring
that data can be divided into two time sensitive
categories here: short term or long term
This whitepaper will identify and explain
drastically different outcomes when you choose
between short term strategy that comes with
hidden costs which are not so apparent until time
passes and how a long term strategy addresses
these concerns.
Long term web harvesting
strategy accounts for all
costs that results in positive
ROI into the future.
Short term web scraping
strategy has hidden costs
that results in negative ROI
with doubts about the
future.

Costs of Short Term Strategy
Manual Labor: Error prone, time bottleneck, unproductive and does not scale.
Outsourced Labor: Communication bottleneck, training costs, linear costs with scale.
Developers: Technical debt, developer bottleneck, costly to maintain, deploy & scale.
Data as a Service: Vulnerable to the same hidden costs of Outsourced Labor.
Web Data Harvesting Tool: Operating costs, limited capability, limited scalability.
Conclusion: Labor intensive solutions such as Data as a Service, all suffer from the
naturally limiting capabilities of human labor-slow, error prone, communication difficulties.
Development incurs growing cost as a result of taking on more technical debt and
deployment issues. Web Data Harvesting Tool is the most ideal solution but still suffers
in the short term from operating costs, limited capability and limited scalability.
These are short term web harvesting strategies that have been traditionally used in the
past. They range from manual to outsourced labor, hiring developers and using tools.

There are many web data harvesting tools in the market today but they are unable to
solve these 3 major challenges that
Steep Overhead: You aren't explicitly writing code but you realize that there is a
steep learning curve from having to 'program' visually that lengthens your time to
market and raises the cost of changes in your web harvesting needs.
Limited Capabilities: You realize you can't extract data from javascript and AJAX
websites because your crawler is unable to emulate a real browser. You become
locked in with a vendor to make any small changes without paying a fee.
Limited Scalability: Limited capability from being unable to render javascript
made it easy to detect your crawler, and attempts to increase data extraction
speed from a single IP address leads to a double whammy. Future is uncertain.
Current Market Challenges
Conclusion: The benefits of a web scraping tool is offset by hidden costs that arise in the
long run. We need a long term approach that will fully address above pain points to
maximize the return on investment in a web scraping tool.

This is an overview of our response to address the current challenges of web harvesting
and tomorrow's web.
Low Overhead: Less steps means time saved on creating or editing a crawler
for a website. Follow the wizard to create a crawler in minutes. A short live
demo session is often enough to being extracting data on your own. It allows
you to automate even the most complex web automation needs.
Complete Capability: Imagine a robot that mimics human browsing actions on
a real browser to harvest data for you. That is exactly what our servers do
except faster and more accurate. You can choose to deploy it onsite as well.
Infinite Scalability: Build a cluster of servers to harvest more data quickly.
This network of servers allows you to extract data completely by randomizing
IP addresses.
Architecture For Success
Conclusion: Scrape.it carries low overhead as it is accessible to a wide range of audience
from less technical to highly technical employees. Our cluster of servers that can mimic
human web browsing adds significant scalability and support for almost any website that
can be viewed in your web browser.

Full range of customizations to suit your web data harvesting requirements:
# of Seats: The number of computers you can install the browser extension on.
This includes continued updates and fixes to the Scrape.it client which is used to
create crawlers. Create unlimited number of crawlers.
# of Servers: A server runs your crawlers which renders websites using a real
web browser. It performs human-tasks like clicking, filling forms, logging in, and
extracting data but at superhuman speeds. A cluster of servers can significantly
increase your data extraction speed rate. No per page billing, Unmetered.
IP Rotation Rate: Each server has a unique IP address. A cluster of servers can
create the desired IP rotation effect. When crawling, you will randomly get a
changing IP address. This rate of IP address change can be scaled.
Managed Campaigns: Fully managed data harvesting campaigns and support.
Data & Development: Integrations, API development, data wrangling etc.
Training: For many users, a free single live demo call is enough to immediately
begin extracting data using Scrape.it. We can provide extra help.
Customizable Solution

Book a demo by filling out the form at https://scrape.it.
Email: support@scrape.it
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Rethink Web Harvesting and Scraping

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