Data harvesting and mining are crucial for large-scale online data collection. Their growing popularity has caused some websites to employ anti-bot systems, making extracting data even from perfectly legal public sources even harder.
Would you like to know how to secure the success of your data harvesting efforts? You're in the right place. In this article, you'll learn more about data harvesting, its common applications, and how to perform it most efficiently, cost-effectively, and in compliance with privacy laws.
What Is Data Harvesting?
Data harvesting is the process of gathering information from one or more sources. The sources may include web pages, text documents (PDFs, Word files), tabular files (spreadsheets, CSV files), existing datasets, and more.
The data usually comes from publicly available sites. In this scenario, the data collection process is called "web scraping."
The harvested data is aggregated, cleaned, and exported into easy-to-use formats to make it freely accessible to all stakeholders. The information can later be analyzed for different purposes, such as business decision-making, user profiling, customer research, and more.
As of 2024, harvesting and mining data has become more accessible thanks to automated technologies and AI. They support both online and local data retrieval and even biometric data acquisition.
What is the difference between data mining and data harvesting?
Data harvesting is the extraction of data from different sources to structure it. On the other hand, data mining focuses on data analysis and pattern-seeking and involves a vast array of machine learning, statistics, or data management techniques.
How Is Data Harvesting Used?
Data harvesting is a key step in tasks related to several industries, spanning public and private sectors.
Here are the most common data harvesting applications broken down by user type:
Individuals:
- Tracking online prices for better deals,
- Boosting productivity (by tracking personal patterns and digital information),
- Monitoring job openings.
Companies:
- Analyzing customer behavior,
- Improving marketing strategies (e.g., monitoring social media, studying audiences' reactions),
- Enhancing offerings (by learning more about customers' needs and habits).
Governments and the public sector:
- Monitoring and improving national security,
- Formulating public policies,
- Allocating resources efficiently (by assessing public sentiment and adapting government work to emerging social needs,
- Supporting medical research and personalized patient care.
How to Do Data Harvesting: Quick Overview
First, let's go through the general steps required to get started with data harvesting.
1. Identify data sources
Find relevant data sources for your goals, such as websites, data sets, or repositories containing the desired information.
2. Use a data extraction tool
Use a tool to simplify the process of extracting data from source documents. Depending on your needs, this may be a data parsing library, a no-code tool, or a desktop application. Note that automated tools make harvesting data faster and more accurate.
3. Export data in a convenient format
After extracting data, transform it into the required format. The most common formats for integration into analytical tools are CSV, XML, and JSON. You may also need to store the collected information in a database.
Let's see an example. Suppose you want to extract product data from Amazon with a Python script and assume the following:
- The sources are the Amazon product pages of the selected items.
- The data extraction tool is an HTML parsing library, such as Beautiful Soup.
- The export format implemented in Python logic could be CSV.
The automated Python script will:
- Use an HTTP client to connect to the target page.
- Feed the source HTML returned by the server to BeautifulSoup.
- Select the HTML elements of interest and extract data from the parsed document.
- Convert the scraped data to CSV format and export it to an output file.
How Do Websites Prevent Data Harvesting
The race to efficiently and effectively extract data from the web is becoming more and more competitive. The increased demand for data collection has caused websites to guard their users' data. Still, the protection systems make gathering information generally available to the public hard.
Some techniques preventing online data collection include:
- IP bans
- CAPTCHAs
- Fingerprinting
- Honeypots
- Rate limiting
- And more.
Learn more about the data collection prevention techniques from our guide on web scraping challenges.
All these systems block automated software from accessing web pages for data retrieval. When an anti-bot system detects a request from a bot, it blocks it before it can extract the site's data.
How can that be prevented? The only solution is to use web scraping tools with anti-bot bypass capabilities. Let's examine the types of data retrieval software.
Best Data Harvesting Tools
Data harvesting tools can be divided into two categories based on their target audience.
- For everyone: Browser extensions and desktop applications that allow data retrieval without code. While they can be useful for users without coding knowledge, they have many limitations. They tend to be error-prone and likely to get detected, and they usually offer no customization at all.
- For developers: Data parsing libraries that can extract data from several sources, such as HTML, CSV, and text documents. Advanced solutions offer many ways to customize the requests and entirely avoid bot detection.
No-code tools are excellent for basic data extraction but lack the flexibility required for more complex tasks. You must define custom scraping logic in automated scripts to get more reliable results.
Still, a custom script isn't enough to build an effective data collection process. Web scraping APIs, such as ZenRows, reduce online data retrieval to simple API calls. They also provide IP rotation via premium proxies and an AI-powered toolkit to elude any anti-bot system. Thanks to these techniques, you can successfully avoid all bans and blocks.
Is Data Harvesting Legal?
Yes, data collection is legal as long as you abide by the rules set by the target websites. Always comply with their terms of service and respect their robots.txt file to ensure ethical data collection practices.
Conclusion
This article explained the process of harvesting data from different sources. Now you know:
- The meaning of “data harvesting”
- Its use cases and benefits
- Whether it's legal
- The most effective tools to perform data harvesting.
Effective data harvesting relies on bypassing websites' protection technologies, which block automated scripts from accessing data. Web scraping APIs, such as ZenRows, can overcome this problem. Try ZenRows out for free and see for yourself!
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