Normally, one would retrieve the data by copying it and pasting it to the relevant document. But this is tedious and time-consuming as well as difficult when the data to be retrieved is plenty. This is when Web Data Extraction comes into play.
 

Web data Extraction is a type of information retrieval whose goal is to automatically extract structured information, i.e. categorized and contextually and semantically well-defined data from a certain domain, from unstructured machine-readable documents.

(Definition: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_extraction)

Why use Web Data Extraction applications?

Traditionally web data extraction was done through software developed by programmers called ‘Wrappers’. The drawback was for every website one wanted to extract data from, a different ‘Wrapper’ had to be developed. This was again tedious and time-consuming and needed professional software developers.

Web Data Extraction applications solved this problem. These applications use Scripting language which makes it easily customizable with minor adjustments for all kinds of websites. Now, one does not need to be software professional to run a web data extraction program. You and I can run it too, it’s that easy.

Web Data Extraction Software, Automation Anywhere 4.5 FREE Trial

Web Data Extraction Software : Automation Anywhere 4.5

What can you do with Web Data Extraction?

The uses of web data extraction are unlimited. Some examples of Web Data Extraction are:

Extract price lists from the web
Extract users data from the webpage
Extract industry information from the web
Extract orders data from your web account, etc.

Tips for choosing a Web Data Extraction Application

Choosing a correct Web Data Extraction application is essential as web data is unstructured. So, what does one look for in a web data extraction application?

1. Web Recorder Capability: If the software provides web recorder capabilities it becomes easy to record a web data extraction task instead of writing a automation script from scratch.
   
   
2. Easy to learn: The application should be easy to learn and user-friendly so that one can customize it within minutes. If it takes too long to learn, you will end up using it less and less.
   
   
3. Easy to edit the script: It is easy to read the recorded script and make small changes rather than re-recording the whole task.
   
   

Tags: Web data extraction, web data mining, screen scraping, web farming, import tabular data, screen scrape