Gabrielė Montvilė, Head of Account Management at Oxylabs, a leading public web data gathering solutions provider, says that there are many roadblocks companies can face in their web scraping practices. The necessity to fix parsing tools every time a particular website changes layout and high block rates are just a few challenges that can prolong data gathering. Especially, if the company doesn’t have enough human resources dedicated to fixing it or relevant web scraping expertise.
“Outsourced solutions solve such challenges in the background without the client even noticing the issue. As a result, many companies are turning towards ready-to-use solutions to meet their data gathering needs”, – says Gabrielė
Specific challenges, specific solutions
According to her, each industry or business type has their own needs when it comes to data gathering. For example, various marketing and SEO agencies, as well as business consultancies list scalability as an essential criterion when choosing a data gathering solution.
“For such companies, every new client might prompt rescaling their scraping operations. Therefore, they need this process to be as straightforward as possible and available whenever needed”, – Gabrielė explains.
Meanwhile ecommerce companies, in her experience, value speed and the ability to avoid blocks. Travel fare aggregators, on the other hand, depend on the ability to access data from complex websites from any location of the world – as travel pricing might differ from country to country, aggregators need to be able to acquire all that information timely and smoothly.
Having all these different needs in mind, Oxylabs recently launched a family of Scraper APIs – three different products focused on specific public web data needs. Each of them centers around particular data targets to ensure a smooth process and high success rate.
Seamless data gathering regardless of the target
SERP Scraper API offers hyperlocal real-time SERP data extraction at scale. It is the best choice for such use cases as keyword rank tracking, brand monitoring, ads data tracking.
“We have many SEO platforms and agencies among our clients, who get tired of rebuilding their scraping tools after each search engine algorithm, layout or feature change. SERP Scraper API saves precious time building and maintaining in-house scrapers and parsers so clients can focus on data analysis and decision making instead”, – says Gabrielė.
E-Commerce Scraper API stands out with the use of AI-powered solution Adaptive Parser. Simply put, parsing is a process that translates one data format into another to make it more readable and analysis-ready. Adaptive Parser optimizes the data gathering process by adapting to nearly any ecommerce product page, regardless of the structure of HTML code used. The solution is best for pricing intelligence, competitor analysis, and product catalog mapping.
“One of our ecommerce clients needed to gather data from large ecommerce sites and search engines to provide market data for their clients. However, steep data acquisition costs and continuous high block rates slowed down data delivery processes disrupting their core operations, forcing them to spend more time and effort on data extraction than analysis. Oxylabs Ecommerce Scraper API helped them decrease block rates to zero and achieve a 100% success rate. Another positive outcome was reduced data acquisition costs on proxy infrastructure and data parsing”, – Gabrielė explains.
Web Scraper API helps to unlock data at scale from any website. It is especially useful for travel fare monitoring, cybersecurity, and other cases where targets are more complicated.
“A client in the travel industry requires constant monitoring of websites in nearly 200 countries, thus their main headache is avoiding access restrictions based on the user’s geographical location. Web Scraper API helps them get timely high-quality data and ability to offer reliable information to their clients”, – says the Oxylabs representative.
Scraper APIs are the new version of Real Time Crawler, the first data-as-a-service solution by Oxylabs. One of the first web data gathering tools, that focused on gathering ecommerce and search engine data on a large-scale. It was a popular and successful tool that helped numerous companies to reach their data collection goals. Revamped into three distinct Scraper APIs, it now offers an even more simplified way to get public data to meet even the most diverse business requirements.