Last Updated on September 23, 2020 by WebsiteDesigner.sg
Web scraping is a method to get data from a website or an entity that is available online. In Singapore, web scraping services are highly demanded due to the value of data collected.
There are many uses for web scraping in Singapore
- Property prices
Singapore property prices are expensive relative to other countries. With a web scraper in hand, buyers or agents are able to discover good deals that they are unable to retrieve with simple web browsing. If you are able to find a property within a buyer’s budget, you can quickly make a deal with the listing owner. Besides buying and selling, property research companies are able to use machine learning algorithms to discover which areas of Singapore have large price swings in a given period of time.
- Deals
If you are a deal hunter, web scraping can be very useful to find deals that an average person won’t be able to get. For example, if your web scraper is able to scrape food deals websites at certain timings. You can be the first to register and get that deal quick.
- Online Booking
If there is an extremely popular product or service, there will be many people camping on the website to get a chance to buy or book a slot. One example is booking tickets for a popular concert. If you wonder why sometimes the website is always showing a loading icon or it is unresponsive during the launch time, it is because there are tons of people and bots that are pinging the server. If the server is unable to allocate enough bandwidth, it will get overloaded and will not be able to serve the website to new visitors.
How do web scrapers in Singapore store the data?
- Excel sheets, Google Sheets
- Databases (NoSql, MySQL)
How do web scrapers in Singapore remain unidentified?
- Free/Paid Proxies
- VPN
- Random scraping timings
- Random User Agents
- Scrape from 3rd party scrapers
Note: Legal issues
Some websites have terms and conditions for web scraping and may hold you responsible for it. The websites have ip addresses recorded per user. They also have fraud activity monitoring to identify any outliers in your account’s behaviour.
If you engage web scraping services, do choose one that uses proxies to mask the identity of the scraper.