The applications of data collection using automated technologies such as web scraping is on the rise. We've compiled a list of sources from where you can collect reliable data for your business.

1. SOURCES OF
DATA COLLECTION
FOR BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

2. There is a goldmine of web
data freely available to crawl.

3. Businesses need to be
pointing in the right direction
while identifying the correct
sources of data collection for
their particular use case.

4. Before we see the best web
data sources for various
business applications, let’s
take a look at few things that
one should keep in mind
while selection the sources

5. #1 Stay away from sites that block bots
Certain websites use aggressive bot blocking
technologies despite legally allowing web
crawling via their robots.txt rules.
Such sites aren’t great data sources since their
blocking activities might give you incomplete,
skewed or no data at all.
STOP

6. #2 Watch out for broken links
Broken links are a clear sign of a poorly
maintained website.
Broken links can cause issues while the web
crawlers try to navigate the site to reach
different pages to fetch the data.

7. #3 User experience and site design
Websites with a cluttered and complex user
interface often have low quality, unreliable
information available on them.
If you have to use a website with poor user
experience as your source of data, it’s better to
ensure the reliability of the information
manually before proceeding.

8. #4 Frequently updated sites
Fresh data is critical for time-sensitive
applications of web data such as pricing
intelligence, brand monitoring and news feed
aggregation.
For most cases, you should ideally look for
frequently updated websites.

9. Now, let’s look at some of the
sources of data collection for
different business application

10. Brand monitoring using
web crawling helps you
discover negative
opinions voiced by
consumers so as to fix the
overlooked issues within
your offering.
#1 Brand monitoring

11. Ideal sources of data collection
for brand monitoring are:
• Public forums
• Niche blogs
• Reviews section on
e-commerce/travel sites
• Social media platforms
#1 Brand monitoring

12. #2 Sentiment analysis
Here are the popular sources used by companies for
sentiment analysis:
• Social sites like Twitter,
Reddit, YouTube and –
Instagram
• Sites where reviews are
posted
• News websites
• Other niche social media
sites

13. #3 Market research
Market research is crucial
for gauging the market size,
demand and competition
among other important
aspects of the market. With
web scraping, the process
of market research can be
easily automated and
accelerated.

14. #3 Market research
Some of the notable sources for
collecting data for market
research are:
-Government websites
-Statistics websites
-Competitors’ websites

15. #4 News feed aggregation
News and media sites
need ready access to the
breaking news and
trending information
from the web.

16. #4 News feed aggregation
For news feeds aggregation, the best sources are:
• News websites
• Feed aggregator websites
• Social media sites
• Blogs

17. #5 Job feed aggregation
Job boards, HR consultancies and
recruitment analytics firms can make
good use of job posting data.
Since job listings reflect the current
trends in the labor market such as
skills in demand, trending job titles
and the industries that are hiring,
companies in this industry can derive
crucial insights from this data.

18. #5 Job feed aggregation
Best sources for job data aggregation are:
• Job boards
• Career pages of company websites
• Classified websites

19. #6 Pricing intelligence
Competitive pricing is one of
the defining traits of e-
commerce, hotel and flight
booking businesses today.
The price sensitivity of
today’s customer has also
lead to the mushrooming of
price comparison websites.

20. #6 Pricing intelligence
Companies looking to
gather pricing data can
extract it via web scraping
from the following sources:
• Ecommerce portals
• Travel portals
• Price comparison websites

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22. #7 Catalog building
Travel portals with huge
inventory find it difficult to
manage their catalogs.
Keeping the product pages
up to date would require
relevant data extracted from
sources where the hotel
room data is present.

23. #7 Catalog building
The ideal sources for
catalog building are:
• Other travel portals
• Hotel websites

24. #8 Application for financial market
Companies or individuals that are closely
associated with the financial industry would
require near-real time data from sites that host
financial data.
The data is time-sensitive
in this case and would
require a live web
crawling solution to fetch
it with ultra low latency.

25. #8 Application for financial market
Sources of data include:
• Stock market websites
• Websites of major financial
institutions
• News and media sites

26. The applications of
data collection using
automated
technologies such as
web scraping is on
the rise.

27. However, selecting the right
kind of source websites is a
crucial step to ensure proper
results from your data
aggregation project.

28. Since the quality and
relevance of data
present on different
websites vary a lot, one
has to be extremely
selective while adding a
site to the source list.

29. Reliable and relevant sources of
data collection can greatly enhance
the ROI from web scraping.

30. Are you looking for reliable service
to extract data from the web for
your business?
Reach out to us at
sales@promptcloud.com to discuss
your requirements.
www.promptcloud.com