How To Collect Data from the Internet

Do you know there are somewhat 644 million active websites on the Internet right now? And how do you figure what is the best website for you where you can get your answers and can collect and extract data that you need. Data collection can be a difficult and time-consuming task for everyone, not just because of the plenty available options but also to gather the correct and relevant data on which you are working on. Not only individuals but also businesses face a similar problem of data extraction. For data collection, one must know the data collection flow. It all starts with all the data sources that are available on the internet, which are further divided into Primary and Secondary data sources.

Primary data is the type of data which is collected or observed from the first-hand experience whereas Secondary data is collected from someone who is not the user of that data, basically, it is the reuse of the Primary data. We tend to rely on the Secondary data for our collection as it is available easily through websites or in printed form.

A business has many operations, day to day activities, resource management and a variety of tasks to perform for proper functioning and for that to happen the management needs the required information and data on which they can work on. This leads us to collect data from the internet to get the required data to work on.
Every different business has its unique needs and different methods and ways to collect data for it. However, every type of business usually relies on the traditional ‘copy and paste’ method to extract data from targeted websites and which we all know is a lengthy and time-consuming procedure plus it requires a number of employees at the same time to research different websites for the data they need. Not only the time factor but the procedure results in a numerous number of errors too. Many businesses started to realize the amount of time and money wasted on this method and tried to come up with a more sophisticated and efficient method for data collection. Many companies used the option of “Code your own” that is hiring a developer for your own company and building your own web collection by various frameworks such as Selenium IDE, etc. This method requires less number of employees to get involved, it is less time consuming too. But as the data keeps changing, someone is needed to monitor the data on a regular basis so that current information can be used while performing activities. This method can be used by large organizations as they have a various number of departments and a huge amount of data extraction is required on a daily basis by every division or department. Another solution to the problem came up as a company named Ficstar Software made an appearance. Ficstar Software is a Toronto-based provider of web-data mining and extraction solutions. This company can extract and get you data from every possible website be it an e-commerce site, different search engines like Google, Yahoo, Amazon or Monster, and possibly every website which has relevant data for your research. This also made the data extraction procedure shorter preventing errors to occur and eliminating the need of the employees to sit for hours to manually collect the data from the internet. Not only Ficstar Software saved time and money for many companies but it also has a Custom-Designed Web Grabber for the owners of a company, who consider that their data collection should be unique from others. As Ficstar Software quotes “Turn web data into Business Intelligence” many businesses have been benefited from this and it has made their work easy and more efficient. Another one of these methods is the “Data as a service” option, which is one of the most recent ways that are used by companies to collect data. It enables the companies to set up website URLs as needed, data scheming and set up a frequency to refresh the day on maybe daily or monthly basis which is very useful as the data is current and updated and readily available to be delivered.

The tool that is used by this is Import.io. Offering Data as a service option suits those companies which have a good investment as this requires more funds than other option to set up in the business environment.

Not only tools and software but you can now refer certain websites for the whole data extraction process. Websites are categorized into basic headings such as Data Sources, Geographic Data which have different big websites which help in the extraction of big data for companies.

What you gather here is a collection of data from the Internet which is a long and time-consuming process and there are certain methods which help us to make it easy so that data extraction can be done efficiently and effectively.