We all have heard the quote “Data is the new oil” and if you have landed on this page, you already know web data couldn’t have been more important. However, the sad part is, not all data available online is structured, readable, and usable. On the contrary, the good part is that there is an immense opportunity in this field.
You cannot use unrefined and unprocessed oil and similarly, you cannot use unprocessed, raw data. Just like oil needs to be converted into petroleum or gasoline for use, raw data needs to be converted into information to make it capable of being analyzed and useful.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is extracting and parsing web data and transforming it into a structured and readable format that can be used by data analyzers for research, digital marketing, sales, product comparison, and more. In other words, web scraping is a method of collecting, collating, and structuring unorganized data already available on the internet for various purposes.
Uses of Web Scraping
Web scraping simply makes data useful for several business purposes, like –
- Research – Data scientists and researchers in the field of science, business, medicine, sports, journalism, and many more need processed data to conduct their studies and draw conclusions.
- SEO Monitoring – Which digital marketing campaigns work and which ones contribute to a company’s growth are generally analyzed by SEO tools that work on web scrapping.
- Product Comparisons – Web scraping makes it possible to analyze several products, their popularity, and their prices on the market.
- Sales and Marketing – Sales and marketing of any company are purely based on numbers. If a company uses web scraping, it can clearly foresee and forecast several patterns in the market and act accordingly to increase its sales.
Why is Python Used For Web Scrapping?
Python is very good when it comes to handling web crawling tasks. Moreover, it offers a large collection of libraries such as Beautiful Soup, Scrapy, Numpy, and Pandas among others which allows for the provision of several methods and services for numerous purposes.
Below are some of the reasons that make Python one of the most preferable coding languages for web scrapping.
- Easy to code – Python is amongst the easiest coding languages. Since no curly braces “{}” or semi-colons “;” are required, it becomes easy to code in Python.
- Easy syntax – Python syntax is extremely easy to understand. It is only the indentation that works to differentiate between different blocks of codes.
- Dynamically-typed language – A dynamically-typed language is one that offers high flexibility with minimal optimization. It not only saves your time but makes the language easy to code.
- Huge set of libraries – Python offers several libraries for web scraping, such as Beautiful Soup and Scrapy. It also has different libraries for numerous other purposes like data visualization and machine learning.
- Huge community – Whenever you are stuck while writing code for any purpose, Python offers a huge community that can help you.
How Does a VPN Help in Web Scrapping?
A VPN or a virtual private network helps in changing your online location and IP address by hiding your original IP address and encrypting your online activities with the support of strong encryption techniques.
It lets you connect to a remote VPN server (that may even be located in a far-off country) and it is the location of this server that decides your current virtual location and IP address. This results in masking your original IP and making only the virtual IP visible to the internet.
The VPN creates an encrypted tunnel that starts from your device and goes to the destination network (or the remote server). VPN also has several security and privacy features that keep your IP, your VPN usage, and your internet activities hidden from the internet.
And hence when you use a VPN for web scrapping, all your online activities, data, and web scraping traffic are hidden from the internet and cybercriminals.
Below are some reasons why you should use a VPN for Python web scraping.
- Protecting your identity – The VPN that you will use while web scraping with Python is going to conceal your real IP address and will only show the virtual IP address that you will get after connecting to a remote VPN server, thereby protecting your actual location and identity from your internet service provider (ISP) and cyber criminals.
- Encrypting your web scraping traffic – A whopping 30,000 websites are hacked or cyber-attacked each day across the world. In such a scenario, it is critically important to keep your web scraping traffic hidden and protected from online snoopers and hackers so your research and data don’t get compromised. A VPN helps encrypt your internet traffic while sending or receiving it on your device by using numerous robust encryption protocols, technologies, and security and privacy features.
- Bypass geo-restrictions – While conducting a study, you might get stuck due to the geographical restrictions that your country’s laws impose on a substantially important site. To visit such websites, you need a tool that can help bypass such geo-blocks and make you visible online from some other country. And, here’s where a VPN will come in handy for you.
- Circumvent censorship – Many schools, colleges, and organizations ban the use of certain websites, such as social media websites, on their premises. With a VPN, you can easily get around this censorship and access the websites that you want for extracting data for your web scraping.
Conclusion
Web scraping is the extraction and structurization of web data for the purpose of conducting a study that can be helpful in digital marketing, sales and marketing, research, and a lot of other things. The easiest coding language to learn and perform web scraping is Python.
If you use a VPN for Python web scraping, you can save yourself from identity theft, data theft, geographical restrictions, and censorship of your organization. To know the factors that you need to look for in a VPN before subscribing and to know the best VPNs for Python web scraping, check out the website VPNBrains.
