Data has become a big word, as any type of industry or Internet denizen with established Internet presence, or with browsing imprints, furnish data that are usable to others. In its simplest meaning, data is just the same as information. Data may come from news publications, or be about a web visitor’s personal information regarding location, email address, age, gender, race and other factors that describe the demography of the population to which a visitor belongs. Transactions carried out via online facilities also furnish data that is usable for a particular point of interest.
Although not many are aware that their data are being collected and compiled, a site that gathers and stores information about its visitors has to ask permission before a reader proceeds with site interaction. On the other hand, other entities may scrape data from the pages of a website, which they may use for a number of reasons; such as that of developing marketing strategies, or as components of medical, business, legal, or scientific studies.
However, for scraped data to be useful, it must be analyzed in ways that are relevant to the purpose for which information was gathered.
About Chrome’s Web Scraper Extension
Web Scraper Chrome Extension is a free tool that allows Chrome users to collect data that can be readily transferred to a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file. This denotes that data scraped or gathered from the worldwide web, can be converted into machine-readable information for a computer software to read and process, usually for comprehensive analysis.
Installing the Web Scraper tool as extension to the Google Chrome browser is already a great help because it allows a user to build a sitemap. That particular feature can be used for planning on how and what to scrape as data from specific pages of a website. This Chrome plugin is capàble of handling pages with JavaScript and Ajax. Although many consider the lack of automation as a downside, this free tool is powerful enough to serve the web scraping purpose for which it was intended.