Web Scraper Project Report Submitted to Chhattisgarh Swami Vivekanand Technical University, Bhilai (India) In partial fulfillment for award of the degree of BACHELOR OF ENGINEERING. In Computer Science and Engineering By Mr. Rajnish Singh Thakur Mr. Ajay Patel Under the Guidance of Mr. Nitesh Nema LCI" Department of Computer Science and Engineering Lakhmi Chand Institute of Technology, Bilaspur Session 2021-22DECLARATION BY THE STUDENT We the undersigned solemnly declare that the project report titled WEB SCRAPER is based on our own work carried out during the course of our study under the supervision of MR. NITESH NEMA. We assert that the statements made and conclusions drawn are an outcome of our work. We further certify that * The work contained in the report original and has been done by us under the general supervision of our supervisor(s). + The work has not been submitted to any other Institute for any other degree/diploma/certificate in this university or any other University of India or abroad. * We have followed the guidelines provided by the University in writing the report. + Whenever we have used materials (data, theoretical analysis, and text) from other sources, we have given due credit to them by citing them in the text of the report and giving their details in the references. Rajnish Singh Thakur ROLL NO. - 303102219017 Ajay Patel ROLL NO.- 303102219001CERTIFICATE BY THE EXAMINERS This is to certify that the project report entitled WEB SCRAPER which is submitted by + Rajnish Singh Thakur, Roll no.: 303102219017 + Ajay Patel, roll no.: 303102219001 has been examined by the undersigned as a part of the examination for the award of the degree of Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Chhattisgarh Swami Vivekanand Technical University, Bhilai. (Signature of the External Examiner) (Signature of the Internal Examiner) (Name of the External Examiner) (Name of the Internal Examiner) Date: Date: Designation: Designation: Institute: Institute:ABSTRACT Main objective of Web Scraping is to extract information from one or many websites and process it into simple structures such as spreadsheets, database or CSV file, However, in addition to be a very complicated task, Web Scraping is resource and time consuming, mainly when it is carried out manually. Previous studies have developed several automated solutions. In the near future, Web scraping will be one of the important tools in the lead generation process. The web scraping tool can make market research of the particular product/services and enormous benefits to offer in the marketing field.er awe Table of Contents Introduction Web Data Scraping Process . Application of Web Scraping Introduction to Software/language Used . Project (Web Scraper) Result Analysis and Discussion . Conclusion . References & Appendices1. Introduction In today’s competitive world everybody is looking for ways to innovate and make use of new technologies. Web scraping (also called web data extraction or data scraping) provides a solution for those who want to get access to structured web data in an automated fashion. Web scraping is useful if the public website you want to get data from doesn’t have an API, or it does but provides only limited access to the data, Web Scraper What Is Web Scraping Web scraping is the process of collecting structured web data in an automated fashion. It’s also called web data extraction. Some of the main use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, and market research among many others. In general, web data extraction is used by people and businesses who want to make use of the vast amount of publicly available web data to make smarter decisions If you've ever copied and pasted information from a website, you've performed the same function as any web scraper, only on a microscopic, manual scale. Unlike the mundane, mind- numbing process of manually extracting data, web scraping uses intelligent automation to retrieve hundreds, millions, or even billions of data points from the internet’s seemingly endless frontier. Web scraping is popular And it should not be surprising because web scraping provides something really valuable that nothing else can: it gives you structured web data from any public website. More than a modern convenience, the true power of data web scraping lies in its ability to build and power some of the world’s most revolutionary business applications. “Transformative” doesn’t even begin to describe the way some compat use web scraped data to enhance their operations, informing executive decisions all the way down to individual customer service experiences.The basics of web scraping It'sextremely simple, in truth, and works by way of two parts: a web crawler and a web scraper. The web crawler is the horse, and the scraper is the chariot. The crawler leads the scraper, as if by hand, through the internet, where it extracts the data requested, Learn the difference between web crawling & web scraping and how they work. The Crawler A web crawler, which we generally call a “spider,” is an artificial intelligence that browses the internet to index and search for content by following links and exploring, like a person with too much time on their hands. In many projects, you first “crawl” the web or one specific website to discover URLs which then you pass on to your scraper. The scraper ‘A web scraper is a specialized tool designed to accurately and quickly extract data from a web page. Web scrapers vary widely in design and complexity, depending on the project. An \d the data important part of every scraper is the data locators (or selectors) that are used to that you want to extract from the HTML file - usually, XPath, CSS selectors, regex, or a combination of them is applied.2.Web Data Scraping Process What is a scraping tool? A web scraping tool is a software program that’s designed specifically to extract (or ‘scrape”) relevant information from websites. You'll almost certainly be using some kind of scrape tool whenever you are collecting data from web pages programmatically. A scraping tool typically makes HTTP requests to a target website and extracts the data from a page. Usually, it parses content that is publicly accessible and visible to users and rendered by the server as HTML. Sometimes it also makes requests to internal application programming interfaces (APIs) for some associated data — like product prices or contact details — that are stored in a database and delivered to a browser via HTTP requests ‘There are various kinds of web scrape tools out there, with capabilities that can be customized to suit different extraction projects. For example, you might need a scraping tool that can recognize unique HTML site structures, or extract, reformat and store data from APIs. Scraping tools can be large frameworks designed for all kinds of typical scraping tasks, but you can also use general-purpose programming libraries and combine them to create a scraper. For example,you might use an HTTP requests library - such as the Python-Requests library - and combine it with the Python BeautifulSoup library to scrape data from your page. Or you may use a dedicated framework that combines an HTTP client an HTML parsing library. ‘One popular example is Scrapy, an open-source library created for advanced scraping needs. The web data scraping process If you, do it yourself using website scraping tools ‘This is what a general DIY web scraping process looks like: 1. Identify the target website Collect URLs of the pages where you want to extract data from Make a request to these URLs to get the HTML of the page Use locators to find the data in the HTML. Save the data in a JSON or CSV file or s ye en me other structured formatPRICING DATA 7 mnie \. —_— eee | a= ‘CONTENT Scraper's Database Your Website But unfortunately, there are quite a few challenges you need to tackle if you need data at scale. For example, maintaining the scraper if the website layout changes, managing proxies, executing javascript, or working around antibots. These are all deeply technical problems that ccan eat up a lot of resources. There are multiple open-source web data scraping tools that you can use but they all have their limitations. That’s part of the reason many businesses choose to outsource their web data projects.3.Application Of Web Scraping Price intelligence In our experience, price intelligence is the biggest use case for web scraping. Extracting product and pricing information from e-commerce websites, then turning it into intelligence is an important part of modern e-commerce companies that want to make better pricing/marketing decisions based on data. How web pricing data and price intelligence can be useful: + Dynamic pricing + Revenue optimization + Competitor monitoring + Product trend monitoring + Brand and MAP compliance Market research Market research is critical — and should be driven by the most accurate information available: High quality, high volume, and highly insightful web scraped data of every shape and size is fueling market analysis and business intelligence across the globe. + Market trend analysis + Market pricing © Optimizing point of entry + Research & development + Competitor monitoring Alternative data for finance Unearth alpha and radically create value with web data tailored specifically for investors. The decision-making process has never been as informed, nor data as insightful — and the world’s leading firms are increasingly consuming web scraped data, given its incredible strategic value. + Extracting Insights from SEC Filings + Estimating Company Fundamentals + Public Sentiment Integrations + News MonitoringReal estate The digital transformation of real estate in the past twenty years threatens to disrupt traditional firms and create powerful new players in the industry. By incorporating web scraped product, data into everyday business, agents and brokerages can protect against top-down online competition and make informed decisions within the market. + Appraising Property Value + Monitoring Vacancy Rates + Estimating Rental Yields + Understanding Market Direction News & content monitoring Modern media can create outstanding value or an existential threat to your business - in a single news cycle. If you're a company that depends on timely news analyses, or a company that frequently appears in the news, web scraping news data is the ultimate solution for monitoring, aggregating, and parsing the most critical stories from your industry. + Investment Decision Making + Online Public Sentiment Analysis, + Competitor Monitoring + Political Campaigns + Sentiment Analysis Lead generation Lead generation is a crucial marketing/sales activity for all businesses. In the 2020 Hubspot report, 61% of inbound marketers said generating traffic and leads was their number 1 challenge. Fortunately, web data extraction can be used to get access to structured lead lists from the web. Brand monitoring In today’s highly competitive market, it's a top priority to protect your online reputation Whether you sell your products online and have a strict pricing policy that you need to enforce or just want to know how people perceive your products online, brand monitoring with web scraping can give you this kind of information.Business automation In some situations, it can be cumbersome to get access to your data. Maybe you need to extract data from a website that is your own or your partners in a structured way. But there’s no easy internal way to do it and it makes sense to create a scraper and simply grab that data. As opposed to trying to work your way through complicated internal systems. MAP monitoring Minimum advertised price (MAP) monitoring is the standard practice to make sure a brand’s online prices are aligned with their pricing policy. With tons of resellers and distributors, it’s impossible to monitor the prices manually. That's why web scraping comes in handy because you can keep an eye on your products’ prices without lifting a finger4. Introduction to Software/language Used Python Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynami semantics. Its high-level built in data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, make it very attractive for Rapid Application Development, as well as for use as a scripting or glue language to connect existing components together. Python's simple, easy to learn syntax emphasizes readability and therefore reduces the cost of program maintenance. Python supports modules and packages, which encourages program modularity and code reuse. The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are available in source or binary form without charge for all major platforms, and can be freely distributed. Often, programmers fall in love with Python because of the increased productivity it provides. Since there is no compilation step, the edit-test-debug cycle is incredibly fast. Debugging Python programs is easy: a bug or bad input will never cause a segmentation fault. Instead, when the interpreter discovers an error, it raises an exception. When the program doesn't catch the exception, the interpreter prints a stack trace, A source level debugger allows inspection of local and global variables, evaluation of arbitrary expressions, setting breakpoints, stepping through the code a line at a time, and so on. The debugger is written in Python itself, testifying to Python's introspective power. On the other hand, often the quickest way to debug a program is to add a few print statements to the source: the fast edit-test-debug cycle makes this simple approach very effective. Python advantages for web scraping Diverse libraries Python has a fantastic collection of libraries such as BeautifulSoup, Selenium, Ixml, and much more. These libraries are a perfect fit for web scraping and, also, for further work with extracted data. You will find more information about these libraries below. Ease to use To put it simply, Python is easy to code. Of course, itis wrong to believe that you would easily write a code for web scraping without any programming knowledge. But, compared to other languages, it is much easier to use as you do not have to add semicolons like “:” or curly-brackets “{}” everywhere. Many developers agree that this is the reason why Python is less messy. Furthermore, Python syntax is clear and easy to read. Developers can simply navigate between different blocks in the code. Saves time As you probably know, web scraping was created to simplify time-consuming tasks like collecting vast amounts of data manually. Using Python for web scraping is similar because you are able to write a little bit of code that completes a large task. Python saves a bunch of developers’ time Community As Python is one of the most popular programming languages, it also has a very active community. Developers are sharing their knowledge on various questions, so if you are struggling while writing the code, you can always search for help. Python libraries used for web scraping Powerful frameworks and libraries, explicitly built for web scraping, are the main reason why Python is a popular choice for data extraction. We will take a closer look at all the essential libraries that makes every developer’s web scraping tasks much easier Selenium: The primary purpose of Selenium is to test web applications. However, it is not limited to do just that as you can use Selenium for web scraping. It automates script processes because, for web scraping, the script needs to interact with a browser to perform repetitive tasks like clicking, scrolling, etc. If you are interested in web scraping with Selenium, check out our other blog posts. BeautifulSoup BeautifulSoup is widely used for parsing the HTML files. According to their documentation, BeautifulSoup library is precisely built for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It saves developers hours or even days of work.Pandas According to their official site, Pandas in web scraping is used for data manipulation and analysis. Pandas’ features include flexible reshaping and pivoting of data sets, reading and writing data between in-memory data structures and different formats, aggregating or transforming data, etc. Requests (HTTP for Humans) This library is used for making various types of HTTP requests like GET, POST. Requests library retrieves only static content of the page. This library does not parse the HTML data extracted from web sites. However, requests library can be used for basic web scraping tasks. Ixml This library is similar to BeautifulSoup because developers use Ixml for proces HTML files in the Python language. ing XML and 105.Project (Web Scraper) Amazon Product Scraper ‘A command-line tool for scraping Amazon product data to CSV or JSON format(s). Requirements © Pip3 * Python3 Usage To launch the Amazon scraper, locate the amazon-product-scraper folder via terminal and type python amazon_scraper.py -k "your keyword”. This will start the program. NOTE: you must declare either -k or --keyword before entering your keyword. It’s a required argument. © amazon_scraper.py -> the name of a scraper file, * -kor--keyword -> required argument to pass before entering your keyword, © -p or --proxies -> optional argument to enable proxies. To avoid getting blocked we highly recommend using proxies. For highest success rate, I suggest Residential Proxies over Datacenter as they're almost impossible to detect and have the smallest footprint. If you decide to use different proxy provider services keep in mind that you'll have to make some minor adjustments in get-proxies.py file. = or ~json -> optional argument for storing extracted data in json format. Default output format is csv. uExample of Product Data #1 .csv KEYWORD PRODUCT,PRODUCT,PRICE PRODUCT, NUMBER_OF_RATINGS 1 electronicehttps://wv Oculus Qu $299.00 47 3871 1 electronicchttps://wvNintendo Switch witl 96,928 4 electronicchttps://wvRocklam 6$135.85 26,115 1 electronicshttps://wvSleep Heac$19.99 17,581 1 electronicshttps://wvSemsung £$279.99 10516. 4 electronicchttps://wvORASANT $66.99 418 4 electronicshttps://wvBose Soun $129.00, 36,353 1 electronicchttps://wvPye Portal $128.69 929 1 electronicshttps://wvFender Fre$99.99 1337 4 electronicchttps://weViper 787 $61.38 418 4 electronicehttps://wv8500Lume $199.99 37 1 electronicchttps://wv Atal Flashback 9 - El aaa 1 electronicshttps://wvVMAN 15(524.99 488 1 electronicehttps://wv Avengers Marvel Lege 3532 1 electronicehttps://wv Video Camera Carnco 50 1 electronieshttps://wv ASURION «$113.98 2.829 20 Example of Product Data #2 .json Bann pn Nod i sous un*s “hetps//a ante. cols otmestpge”, 2-80 OTM": “apple IPhone Ta Pro ae, 128, Pacific blue Ulored (coms ce "06.0", 1. heporisrphonestaid6SOUSERESNE. I, somes “hepa mse. coe itmestpge emo" “phones, haat ame psa maen cone iene: Aa Space ray Gp BoeDet rete 1 2Pkepordsiphrstgid soe SIS 2 maoet Me": “ype hare 13 ro Paty AB, space cry Unlocked (ered Sune UR" psn. cone ighaestpage, 26.Result Analysis and Discussion Amazon has been on the cutting edge of collecting, storing, and analyzing a large amount of data, Be it customer data, product information, data about retailers, or even information on the general market trends. Since Amazon is one of the largest e-commerce websites, a lot of analysts and firms depend on the data extracted from here to derive actionable insights. The growing e-commerce industry demands sophisticated analytical techniques to predict, market trends, study customer temperament, or even get a competitive edge over the myriad of players in this sector. To augment the strength of these analytical techniques, you need high- quality reliable data, What can we do with this scraped data? 1. Assess Competition ‘Competition analysis is one of the most crucial aspects of business decision making. Collecting competing products’ data via seraping amazon data can help an Amazon dealer develop Proper marketing strategies. This data is instrumental in comparing and monitoring competing products (prices, reviews, availability, ...) of competitors selling the same products as you. Web data can be leveraged by online dealers for competitor pricing analysis, competitive pricing, and repricing, cost management, seasonality tracking ete. B2. Determine product ranking i= = = A product's ranking in the e-commerce site essentially decides the number of sales it'll make. For an Amazon dealer, the best way to create bludgeoning sales would be to ensure their products rank first in the relevant search, Amazon adapts to calculate product-ranks. Scraping amazon data enables Amazon dealers to find elements that affect product ranking and in turn, create effective strategies to improve rankings, Analyze top reviews Amazon's ranking algorithm gives huge weight to product reviews. An online business should continuously monitor how its product’s market performance. The best way to evaluate our product's performance is through Product Reviews filled in by customers. A genuine product review has its pros and puts forth a customer's perspective, which may often be overlooked by the seller. ‘Web scraping allows Amazon dealers to monitor how their products perform in the market by studying product reviews. With this data in hand, Amazon dealers would be able to assess what aspects of their products they should enhance, and what measures they can take to improve customer's experience. 44, Assess market data To determine your most profitable niche, dealers need to study market data. This can essentially highlight what kind of products are the most in-demand, understand the category structure of Amazon, and how your products fit in the existing market, Scraping amazon data from of the ‘competing products can provide such information, which can then be leveraged by a dealer to optimize their internal assortment and best utilize their manufacturing resources. 5. Evaluate offers For a customer, offers act as the most enticing element of e-commerce sites. Knowing what your competitor has to offer can aid you in designing an effective marketing strategy for our products. Web scraping amazon data allows you to focus on Competitor pricing analysis, real-time cost tracking and tracking seasonal changes for coming up with better product, offers for a consumer. 156. Realize target group Every seller specializes in a particular niche and has a certain kind of customer base. By knowing their target group, a dealer can make informed choices about the products it offers. Scraping customer preferences on Amazon can enlighten a dealer of its customer base. While Amazon protects customer profile to a large extent, dealers can come up with a strategy to collect profiles of customers who have bought their products. This customer data can then be used by Amazon dealers to study their shopping habits and accordingly plan different sets of product combo for them, thereby boosting sales. 167.Conclusion The Data Scraping Future Whether or not you intend to use data scraping in your work, it’s advisable to educate yourself on the subject, as it is likely to become even more important in the next few years. There are now data scraping AI on the market that can use machine learning to keep on getting, better at recognising inputs which only humans have traditionally been able to interpret — like images. Big improvements in data scraping from images and videos will have far-reaching consequences for digital marketers. As image scraping becomes more in-depth, we'll be able to know far more about online images before we've seen them ourselves — and this, like text- based data scraping, will help us do lots of things better. Then there’s the biggest data scraper of all — Google. The whole experience of web search is, going to be transformed when Google can accurately infer as much from an image as it can from a page of copy — and that goes double from a digital marketing perspective. UE rey | yy Crt 7As the Intemet has grown astronomically and businesses have become increasingly dependent ‘on data, it is now a compulsion to have access to the latest data on every given subject. Data has become the basis of all decision-making processes whether it’s a business or a non- profit organization. Therefore, web scraping has found its applications in every endeavour of note in contemporary times. Itis also becoming increasingly clear that those who will make creative and advanced use of web scraping tool will race ahead of others and gain a competitive advantage. So, leverage web scraping and boost your prospects in your chosen area of endeavour! 188.References & Appendices For Scraper Docs > > > v > > > hups:/www.python.org/ https://docs python org/3/library/argparse.htm| hups://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/ hups://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.parse.html Web Scraping Articles hups://www.zyte.com/learn/what-is-web-scraping/ hups://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/web-scraping-using-python https://www.blog.datahut.co/post/challenges-that-make-amazon-data-scraping-so- painfu