The Limitations of Web Scraping Tools
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Web scraping tools are user-friendly applications designed for data extraction with limited capabilities, suitable for small-scale tasks but often struggle with complex, dynamic websites. These tools require a basic understanding of web technologies and are prone to obsolescence due to frequent website updates, which can impede efficiency. In contrast, Data as a Service (DaaS) providers offer a more robust solution, managing the entire data extraction process and ensuring high-quality results.
The Limitations of Web Scraping Tools
- 2. Web scraping tools are applications that can be used to extract data from the web, with out-of-the-box capabilities requiring minimal manual intervention. They usually come with a visual interface where you can configure and deploy your web crawlers. Tools are an ideal choice if you are just starting out without an adequate budget for data acquisition. The downside is that they are very limited in their capabilities and scale of operation.
- 4. Web scraping tools are usually made to handle simple websites that use numbered navigation and traditional coding practices. If the target site uses dynamic elements like JavaScript/AJAX code, a scraper tool might not be able to fetch the data.
- 5. Web scraping tools are made with small and one time data extraction requirements in mind. Given the limited resources typically available to such tools, they won’t be able to handle large-scale web scraping tasks that involve millions of records.
- 6. Since DIY tools are made for non-technical users, they lack customization options. The tool might work properly as long as the site you are scraping is in line with the tool’s capabilities. If that’s not the case, you won’t have the option to make it work by customizing the tool, which is a major setback.
- 7. Noise in data refers to the unwanted HTML tags or text that get scraped along with the relevant data. Since web scraping tools are ‘one size fits all’ solutions, they lack precision and may deliver data with too much noise in it. Cleaning up of the data can consume time and could prove to be a demanding task.
- 8. Although DIY tools are advertised to be very easy to handle, you will still need to have a basic understanding of how websites work and know some HTML and CSS. If you are not familiar with these, scraping using DIY tools is not for you.
- 9. Websites are updated quite frequently and many of these changes can render your DIY scraper tool useless. In such cases, you would lose data and will be forced to update the tool to make it work with the new changes on the target page.
- 10. Since the scraping tools get outdated often, you will have to maintain the tool by installing timely updates and patches. Since websites are updated quite frequently, the maintenance of scraping tools to cope with the changes can easily become a hindrance to your work efficiency.
- 11. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of DIY web scraping tools. When it comes to web scraping, there is simply no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Tools can fail and return no data, making them unsuitable for enterprise-grade web data extraction use cases. There is also the possibility of the tool delivering wrong or erroneous data.
- 12. Getting the required data from a DaaS provider is by far the best way to extract data from the web. With a data provider, you are completely relieved from the responsibility of crawler setup, maintenance and quality inspection of the data being extracted. Here are some more advantages of the DaaS model: ❖Completely customizable for your requirement ❖Takes end-to-end ownership of the process ❖Quality checks to ensure high quality data ❖Can handle dynamic and complicated websites ❖Leaves you with more time to focus on your core business ❖Cost is lowered