The importance of data and data analytics is growing exponentially every year. Companies and brands are stumbling upon more and more use cases and applications for data scraping. Web scraping has unlocked a huge potential in Business Intelligence, and the spectrum of what you can do to use Data Scraping to promote your organization is infinite.

In this list of the three most amazing real-life examples of scraping, we’ve collected some of the most valuable and practical ways organizations have used web scraping to solve real-life problems!

Data is King.

It helps you serve your customers better. It’s simple logic. When you have more information, you can more clearly advise your customers. By demonstrating your expertise in a manner that puts them at ease, you’re able to deliver a more valuable experience to them.

Data scraping is all around us. In fact, we’ve all some point, probably already visited sites that utilize this method. Let’s take a quick dip into how this whole thing works. There are lots of smart, tech-savvy companies that are using data scraping for business.

Take Pricing Intelligence for example. Companies scrape pricing information from their competitors’ websites. They then store and analyze all the data, and make pricing adjustments as needed to maximize sales and profit.

Another hot sector that uses Scraping is Recruitment. There are start-ups that act as a match-maker for employers looking for talent, and for workers looking for jobs. They have kept in place a massive database of job candidates from posted resumes on sites around the web. They capture a number of job postings and respond to them from their pool of candidates. Their large body of data helps them to close deals before many in the market are aware of the opportunities.

Brands have paid a lot of attention to their reputation online. Innovative companies have also used Scraping in Reputation Management. Social media and review sites have made it a necessity for companies to stay on top of when they are mentioned, and what their customers are saying about them. So a number of companies will scrape data from review sites and social media to keep a pulse on what is being said about them, and where.

There are endless ways in which Scraping can help a brand or an organization perform better with the help of Scraping. Here’s a real-life case study on how one very innovative company ran an interesting test to find out the most ideal industry to work for!

Real Life Case Study – Which is the Most Ideal Industry To Work For?

It doesn’t matter if you’re a fresher entering the job market or if you’re bored to tears at your current position, choosing the right career path in the right industry can be pretty daunting.

When NYC Data Science Academy decided to hunt down the most ideal, most fulfilling industry to work in, it employed creative scraping solutions to come up with the most accurate result.  

NYC Data Science Academy is an educational, training and career development organization. It grew from the combined expertise and commitment of SupStat Inc., a group of data science and big data professionals. Delivering a wealth of experience in all things data science, they provided rigorous technical and strategic training for highly motivated individuals and corporations.

NYC Data Science Academy identified the industries with the highest overall level of worker happiness and the factors that ranked the highest. The main dimensions of an organization that resulted in employee satisfaction were the following:

1. Work-life balance
2. Salary packages
3. Working hours
4. Job security

NYC Data Science Academy used an in-depth analysis of PR news as the major source of data.

Which brings us to the next question. What is PR News? According to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), PR is “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

The aim of public relations is to inform the public, prospective customers, investors, partners, employees, and other stakeholders and ultimately persuade them to maintain a positive or favorable view about the company, organization, or its leadership.

The most used tools in this field are news releases. NYC Data Science Academy used the Hypothesis that “Growing industries create more PR News than dying industries” for this data scraping research.

So, If the researcher can count the number of PR News for various industries over the same time period, he can find fast-growing industries and arguably conclude that the observed industry is the ideal industry to work for.

NYC Data Science Academy decided to employ a sophisticated scraping mechanism for this analysis. The base website for data scraping was www.prnewswire.co.uk by the academy.

Coming to the main technique itself, the scraping spider was designed to:

1. Collect name and recent news URL in 3rd level(which is the lowest level) of industry category
2. For each collected industry, go the recent news list and get news title and release date.
3. Follow the previous news link and get the title of the news and release date until there is no news left.
4. Jump to the next industry category and do the same.

The bot churned out the following result to the research:

 

Number of Categories	177
Number of News gathered	95,459
Release Date Range	April to October 2018
Data size	34Mb (Title, URL, Category)

We decided to delve deep into the data analysis process, and it turns out the following questions were answered

Were the number of PR News release count different between industries?

In top positions were the industries of Computer software, Medical pharmaceutical, Aerospace & Defense, and in the bottom, There are public safety, Office products, and Supermarkets.

Was there a trend observed in the time series

Plot of News Count with Year

 

Industry	PR News Count	Trend
Data Analytics	1432	0.023742
Financial Technology	1574	0.014587

So, what’s the answer to the hottest question of the century? Which industry is most sought after for a happy and long career?

According to NYC Data Science Academy, turns out this was the result:

With the data scraping and analysis, it was found that Computer software, Medical pharmaceutical, Aerospace & Defense were the top industries to work for in 2018

The world is now awash in data, and brands are beginning to see customers in a lot clearer ways.  Remember, that the ultimate goal is to data into information and information into insights.

And we’re here to help you with just that!

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