Web Data scraping, AI & Automation: Made for each other
Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the hot topics in the tech world today. Research reports state that AI is going to take over the world and that will change the world faster than ever before. If we look at the e-commerce world, it is heading towards building an artificially intelligent digital commerce platform. The new e-commerce platform could intelligently recommend most preferred products to the customers. And, if we look at the key source of developing artificial intelligence is data – properly trained data. There are various sources of data. One key source of data is the internet and there are various methods to crawl data from the internet. Automated extraction of data from various websites can be termed as ​web data scraping. Now, let us look at a few aspects of automation in web data scraping or web data crawling.
Why is automation needed for web data scraping? When automation is synced with any term — the thought is fast, accurate and flexible. According to the World Wide Web survey, there are nearly 5 billion websites in 2018. Is it possible to access data manually from all those sites? It is unrealistic. This is when the importance of automated tools to get the data comes into the picture. There are numerous automation tools from which one can scrap data. R and Python are the two major open source software tools used for automated web data scraping.