Web Scraping Frequently Asked Questions

If you know what kind of data you need, e.g. all car crashes in New Zealand, we can help you get it. All we need is a description of your data scraping project, including the output frequency - if you'll need the data to be scraped monthly, weekly, daily or just once.
The more information you provide upfront, the smoother the process will be.

Describe your web scraping project. Do you have one specific web page in mind, or does your project involve scraping multiple websites? Do you need rating and price extraction, or do you need product review scraping with following sentiment analysis? Target data can range from simple contact information such as a person's name and e-mail to latitude and longitude of a car crash.

If you have a general idea of what data you need, we can help you pinpoint the most relevant websites that are worth scraping, be it review platforms, social media or e-commerce platforms.

What is the data output format that you'll need? We can send you a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet over e-mail or we can upload the files to a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server of your choice. Don't hesitate to ask for any imaginable solution. FindDataLab aims to integrate the data into your workflow as seamlessly as possible.

Make sure to check out our pre-order web scraping guide to make the negotiation process quick and seamless.

Don't forget to mention your e-mail or phone number so that our team could contact you to follow up on your inquiry.

After you've described your web scraping project one of our data engineers will carefully look over your request, as well as the website in question (if you have mentioned it) to determine if it's terms of use, robots.txt and other factors permit web scraping.

Our team will contact you as soon as possible. You'll know whether or not your scraping project is technically and legally feasible right away. The consultation is free, with no hidden costs.

Since we offer an individualized solution for every client, the price will vary depending on a few factors such as the complexity of the task and the project scale. For example, if you need to combine data from three sources with 5000 web pages each, the price will be higher than if you need to scrape the contact information from one web page.

Contact us describing your web scraping idea, and we will return with a price for your individualized solution shortly.

Usually, it takes around 4 – 5 workdays, but it really depends on the complexity and scope of your project. We negotiate the terms and order of execution for each project individually and set a different deadline for each client.

Depending on the scope of your project, the time-frame might need to be bigger. One thing that's important to remember is that if you hurry a large-scale data scraping project, you might get blocked by the source website which in turn will prolong the project, as a new web scraping solution will have to be implemented.

You can get the outputs in different formats like CSV, TSV, Excel, MS-Access, MySQL, MSSQL, XML, TXT and others. You name it; we can compute it.

One of our most prevalent output formats is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The tried and tested spreadsheet format is a very versatile solution. One of the things you can do with Excel is to convert it to a different file format, such as CSV or import the Excel data into a MySQL database.

We can send you the data files through e-mail or Google Drive, depending on the amount of data you'll need to receive. Another way of sending files is by using our File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers or an FTP server you specify, such as FileZilla or Cerberus.

We accept payments through bank wire transfer and PayPal or Payoneer. Your purchase will be covered by PayPal Buyer Protection service.

The popularity of a language in a specific niche depends on whether or not there are libraries and frameworks written to address a particular problem and the size of the community using the language.

Python is a trendy programming language in itself, and you can do almost anything with it. Web scraping is no exception. Python has the immensely popular Scrapy framework, as well as individual libraries such as BeautifulSoup and asyncio. Not to mention, you can continue your data analysis further using Python as well since it has numerous machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and statistics libraries.

Thanks to the large Python community, finding answers to your problems is relatively easy as well. More manageable than if you tried web scraping using Julia.

It really depends on convenience. Do you want to use three languages or one for the whole project?

Yes. We have scraped Japanese, German, Chinese and other non-English websites.

No, just relax. Our business model is data as a service. You don't need to register, sign up or spend time building or programming a web scraping tool.

If you choose to scrape with FindDataLab you don't pay for software, servers or proxies; you pay for a team of engineers who will guarantee that you get the data on time.

There's a high possibility that we can. First, we need to find out what exactly is it that you need, so don't hesitate to send us a message. After that, we'll have a conversation about the feasibility of your data scraping project, agree on the price and project milestones. A lot of our clients' ideas have previously been rejected by other web scraping services.

Bottom line is - if we can't extract it, we won't charge you. So why not drop us a line?

You pay only after we agree on all of the details of your web scraping project. We can additionally send you a data sample shortly after payment. If the data sample does not meet your expectations, we will make adjustments.

Of course, you can. We will determine the price depending on the amount of data that you'll need, so the price will vary on a project-by-project basis. A good example of a subscription model is our Brand Monitoring service.

All you have to do is contact us and describe your web scraping project idea. We'll respond as soon as we can.

Since we offer an individualized solution, the price varies for each project depending on the complexity of the website, server limitations as well as the scale of the project, e.g. if you need 5 or 5000 web pages scraped.

We prepeared previously blog post for reading with details about web scraping legality.

No, but web scraping is an integral part of data mining.

Data mining is the process of finding patterns in large data sets which is usually done by implementing a machine learning solution. This is where web scraping comes in. Web scraping is singlehandedly one of the more efficient ways of gathering large data sets, and after web scraping and data wrangling you'll have an analysis-ready data-set.

The most basic way of not getting blocked when scraping a website is by spacing out your requests so that the website doesn't get overloaded. The minimum request delay time usually can be found in the robots.txt file of a website.

If you want to ensure further that you don't get blocked, make sure to randomize the length of pauses between requests, as well as rotate the IP addresses and user-agents from time to time.

Avoid hidden links or so-called 'honey pots' and make sure that you have persistent cookies for your web scraping session.

Web scraping is the process of getting data from a website. This can be done by manually copy-pasting or by using the software. Nowadays, web scraping has mostly become synonymous with automated data collection.

You'll often hear web scraping being used as a blanket term for the whole process of visiting a page or web crawling, getting data or web scraping, as well as cleaning and ordering the data or in other words - data wrangling and data enrichment.