I recently came across this question in Quora – How real businesses use web scraping? Since then I wanted to share some thoughts based on my learning experience at Datahut.

These are a few examples of how our clients (at Datahut) are using web scraping for their business.

Lead generation – Some of our clients are using our service to scrape data from online directories, B2B portals, government sites and even their competitor’s website to generate high-quality leads. Web scraping is a great way to generate quality leads with minimum investment.

Price monitoring comparison – Price monitoring is commonly used in travel and e-commerce industries. Price monitoring is done by scraping prices from the competitor websites. In the competitive e-commerce market, price monitoring can be a key differentiator of success.

Reputation monitoring – Good online reputation is a must for business. We use web scraping to monitor popular search engines and influential reviews sites for our customers. Scrapes will be performed daily and they will be notified if there are new reviews. It allows them to deal with negative publicity before it affects business.

Market research – A lot of financial and marketing data is available on the web. You can get insights from the market trends by scraping and analyzing this data. This is helpful, especially for startups which do not have a big budget to buy reports.

Content curation – Content curation apps brings a personalised and targeted news to the end user. A lot of content curation apps just scrape data such as news from other resources to display in their app.

Event aggregators – Event listing from various sites is scraped to create an application that consolidates all of the events together. This data is then used for various monetary purposes.

A lot of businesses are using web scraping with great success to get data. Google built their empire on crawling the web.

Do you have any ideas?

Please comment below, let’s discuss.

Thanks for reading this blog post. Datahut offers affordable data extraction services (DaaS) . If you need help with your web scraping projects let us know and we will be glad to help.