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Web scraping is a technique used to extract large amounts of data from websites and save onto your computer in a database or time table format. There are many reasons businesses would use this information for lead generation, SEO, or to better understand their customers.
However, you can do a lot of fun projects in your free time that doesn’t have to be associated with work or a company. Before you start using your programming skills to find and extract information, it’s essential to know how to find a reputable guide for your web scraping project.
How to Find Reputable Guides
There are many valuable guides on the internet that walk you through how to web scrape with information, but unless you’re a programmer, these can be difficult to understand. If you aren’t well versed in a computing language, it’s better to install web scraping tools that do this process for you that won’t brick your computer.
Web Scraping Project Ideas
1. Email Mining
It’s possible to scrape emails from multiple web directories, search engines, and websites based on specific criteria and use it for marketing purposes. You can use this information for your own marketing purposes or as a way to make money by selling that data. People often buy email lists to have a broader customer base.
2. Price Monitoring
Multiple websites carry the same product, and this competition can change the price of an item depending on who carries it and the business’s reputation. If you’re looking to buy a video game, you can use web scrapping to find a sale price or a liquidated item and compare them with different competitors to get the better deal.
As an alternative, you can monitor competitor prices for your own business. You can use this method to see whether or not retailers are selling above the Minimum Advertised Price, and your business can adjust this price to compete.
3. Reddit Content
Reddit is a social media community full of content and photos and operates similarly to many engagement websites. You can use web scrapping to collect upvotes, comments, and user data to better understand a subreddit. This can be done for fun or to better understand a group of people you want to sell to, which is also valuable to do on Facebook or Instagram.
4. Job Recruitment
Unemployment rates have skyrocketed in the past few months, and many are looking for jobs on a daily basis. Searching multiple job sites takes considerable manpower, but web scraping can combine job boards based on keywords related to job title, education, or general skills. Job seekers can be redirected to the original site where they can apply to the company directly.
5. User Reviews
Combining and understanding multiple user reviews can be helpful for both customers and business owners. Customers can see key problems with a product so they can decide if its worth it to buy from that business, while businesses can fix key issues customers are discussing. You can sell this data to companies for a significant profit.
