web scraping thesis

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• CAREER COLUMN
• 08 September 2020

How we learnt to stop worrying and love web scraping

• Nicholas J. DeVito 0 ,
• Georgia C. Richards 1 &
• Peter Inglesby 2

Nicholas J. DeVito is a doctoral candidate and researcher at the EBM DataLab at the University of Oxford, UK.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Georgia C. Richards is a doctoral candidate and researcher at the EBM DataLab at the University of Oxford, UK.

Peter Inglesby is a software engineer at the EBM DataLab at the University of Oxford, UK.

In research, time and resources are precious. Automating common tasks, such as data collection, can make a project efficient and repeatable, leading in turn to increased productivity and output. You will end up with a shareble and reproducible method for data collection that can be verified, used and expanded on by others — in other words, a computationally reproducible data-collection workflow.

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Nature 585 , 621-622 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02558-0

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An Introduction to Web Scraping for Research

Like web archiving , web scraping is a process by which you can collect data from websites and save it for further research or preserve it over time. Also like web archiving, web scraping can be done through manual selection or it can involve the automated crawling of web pages using pre-programmed scraping applications.

Unlike web archiving, which is designed to preserve the look and feel of websites, web scraping is mostly used for gathering textual data. Most web scraping tools also allow you to structure the data as you collect it. So, instead of massive unstructured text files, you can transform your scraped data into spreadsheet, csv, or database formats that allow you to analyze and use it in your research. 

There are many applications for web scraping. Companies use it for market and pricing research, weather services use it to track weather information, and real estate companies harvest data on properties. But researchers also use web scraping to perform research on web forums or social media such as Twitter and Facebook, large collections of data or documents published on the web, and for monitoring changes to web pages over time. If you are interested in identifying, collecting, and preserving textual data that exists online, there is almost certainly a scraping tool that can fit your research needs. 

Please be advised that if you are collecting data from web pages, forums, social media, or other web materials for research purposes and it may constitute human subjects research, you must consult with and follow the appropriate UW-Madison Institutional Review Board process as well as follow their guidelines on “ Technology & New Media Research ”. 

How it Works   

The web is filled with text. Some of that text is organized in tables, populated from databases, altogether unstructured, or trapped in PDFs. Most text, though, is structured according to HTML or XHTML markup tags which instruct browsers how to display it. These tags are designed to help text appear in readable ways on the web and like web browsers, web scraping tools can interpret these tags and follow instructions on how to collect the text they contain. 

Web Scraping Tools

The most crucial step for initiating a web scraping project is to select a tool to fit your research needs. Web scraping tools can range from manual browser plug-ins, to desktop applications, to purpose-built libraries within popular programming languages. The features and capabilities of web scraping tools can vary widely and require different investments of time and learning. Some tools require subscription fees, but many are free and open access. 

Browser Plug-in Tools: these tools allow you to install a plugin to your Chrome or Firefox browser. Plug-ins often require more manual work in that you, the user, are going through the pages and selecting what you want to collect. Popular options include:

Scraper : a Chrome plugin Web Scraper.io : Available for Chrome and Firefox

Programming Languages: For large scale, complex scraping projects sometimes the best option is using specific libraries within popular programming languages. These tools require more up front learning, but once set up and going, are largely automated processes. It’s important to remember that to set up and use these tools, you don’t always need to be a programming expert and there are often tutorials that can help you get started. Some popular tools designed for web scraping include:

Scrapy and Beautiful Soup : Python libraries [see tutorial here and here ] rvest : a package in R [see tutorial here ] Apache Nutch : a Java library [see tutorial here ]

Desktop Applications: Downloading one of these tools to your computer can often provide familiar interface features and generally easy to learn workflows. These tools are often quite powerful, but are designed for enterprise contexts and sometimes come with data storage or subscription fees. Some examples include:

Parsehub : Initially free, but includes data limits and subscription storage past those  limits Mozenda : Powerful subscription based tool

Application Programming Interface (API): Technically, a web scraping tool is an Application Programming Interface (API) in that it helps the client (you the user) interact with data stored on a server (the text). It’s helpful to know that, if you’re gathering data from a large company like Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Twitter, they often have their own APIs that can help you gather the data. Using these ready-made tools can sometimes save time and effort and may be worth investigating before you initiate a project. 

The Ethics of Web Scraping 

Included in their introduction to web scraping (using Python), Library Carpentry has produced a detailed set of resources on the ethics of web scraping . These include explicit delineations of what is and is not legal as well as helpful guidelines and best practices for collecting data produced by others. On the page they also include a Web Scraping Code of Conduct that provides quick advice about the most responsible ways to approach projects of this kind. 

Overall, it’s important to remember that because web scraping involves the collection of data produced by others, it’s necessary to consider all the potential privacy and security implications involved in a project. Prior to your project, ensure you understand what constitutes sensitive data on campus and reach out to both your IT and IRB about your project so you have a data management plan prior to collecting any websites. 

Web Scraping Done Right: Best Practices to ensure Ethical Data Collection and Web Scraping

Key Highlights

• The pandemic has accelerated digitisation, which has also resulted in a data surge online
• Using this data for analytics and decision making is a no-brainer
• While data mining and data collection are central to any analytics effort, the key is to make sure quality data is being collected
• One approach to increase the quality of data being used is web scraping since we mostly scrape the data we want from proven, well-known and trusted websites
• But, it is up to decision-makers and business leaders to ensure that all your data scraping efforts are ethical and above the law

The Covid-19 pandemic has shaken the world out of its complacency and catalysed change in many different areas. We now know that disasters can come in any form and can last for a really long time. Urgh!

Wave after wave of the pandemic has had a deep impact on the economy at large. Thanks to globalised supply chains, a lockdown in one part of the world can impact the operations of another company in some other geography. The daily routines of people and organisations have changed, for good or for worse. Of course, companies, governments, and entrepreneurs have responded with newer offerings. Some new trends that have emerged as a result are:

• Remote working even in traditional industries such as manufacturing
• Accelerated digital transformation of processes
• A boom in e-commerce and at-home service economy
• The resilience of supply chains
• Behavioral change in how people spend their time  

A massive surge in online data generation

One  McKinsey  report titled ‘The COVID-19 recovery will be digital’ highlighted why most enterprises were digitising at least some parts of their business – primarily to protect employees and serve customers in new ways. This was further propelled by a skill shortage and the need for AI-based automation to maintain and improve business operations.

As a result, in just eight weeks of the pandemic’s start, digital adoption leaped forward by about five years. For every business, be it manufacturers, banks, retail stores, healthcare service providers, and even schools – digital delivery of services became crucial.

Even though lockdowns have gradually lifted, customers have become accustomed to “getting things done online” meaning businesses must continue to provide a combination of physical and digital services. This has driven up the volume of data being generated. According to  one estimate , data generated was 1.7 megabytes per second per person in 2020. Overall, internet users were generating about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day.

Leveraging the Data Surge

The good news, of course, is that now businesses have more data for running analytics and drawing insights for making informed decisions.

The  data analytics market  is expected to grow at a CAGR of 25.7% from USD 15.11 billion in 2021 to USD 74.99 billion in 2028.

At the same time, the estimated cost of poor data quality is expected to go up to $3.1 trillion yearly in the US alone. Needless to say, poor data quality can massively impact the quality of insights generated from data.

To improve the quality of data, merely aggregating it from different sources is not enough. It needs to be:

But given the volume of data and the heavy resource crunch, ensuring data quality is proving to be a challenge. The answer lies in automating data harnessing using what is called Web Scraping.

Web Scraping 101

Web scraping enables collecting data from across the Internet using bots and other tools that simulate human web surfing. Also called web data extraction, web harvesting, or screen scraping, can be used to look for and collect a specific type of data based on the specific need of an enterprise.

According to  Techopedia , it is a  form of data mining  that is fast becoming a popular tool for collecting aggregated data such as weather reports, market pricing, auction details amongst others. The data thus collected is exported to MS-Excel, a database, or an API.  

How Web Scrapers Work

On submitting the URLs from which the data is to be collected, the web scraper will load the entire HTML code. The entire website, with CSS and JavaScript elements, may be accessed if an advanced scarper tool is used.

Users can specify the data they need or let the scraper extract all data on the page before running the project. This data is then output in CSV format and in the case of advanced scrapers, other formats such as JSON can also be used to feed to an API.

Ethics of Web Scraping

Last but not least, there is one thing that MUST be followed. All your data scraping efforts must be ethical.

Here are few approaches to ensure the Web Scraping process is completely transparent and ethical:

• Use a Public API when available and avoid scraping all together if the data you’re looking for is available through the API
• Pass your data through a user agent string to identify who you are
• Scrape data at a reasonablerate and throttle/control the number of requests per second. The website owner must not think it is a DDoS attack.
• Make sure your enterprise saves only the data it needs
• Don’t scrape private data – Look at the site’s robots.txt and analytics needs to avoid scraping data from sensitive areas.
• Ideally, you must provide a user agent string, that gives the data owner a way to contact you if necessary
• Develop a formal Data Collection Policy

Developing a formal Data Collection Policy

It’s important to develop a formal Data Collection Policy to guide developers and technology teams. This is crucial to ensure all developers abide by best practice.

Policy implementation should include regular audits on robots and their underlying code followed by updated briefings to the relevant team members. This practice is key to ensuring that ethical collection is kept centralised and consistent.

Merit Data & Technology: A Trusted Web Scraping & Data Mining Partner, with a deeply ethical approach   

Though automation makes web scraping sound easy, it is not as straightforward. Some of the challenges include:

• The different formats and designs used by different websites requiring web scrapers with varying functionality and features
• The possibility of websites protecting data with captchas and other methods
• Ensuring ethical data collection by ensuring that the scraper selects only publicly available data as it is illegal to extract data not available in the public domain

Therefore, it requires an expert with experience in working with data to facilitate web scraping in an efficient and effective manner. Merit Data & Technology, with its dedicated team of data scientists, can help you with:

• The Right Infrastructure:  Web scraping needs the right tools and skills to help you meet your business outcomes. While small projects may be manageable, for large data sets, customized scripts and software will be required to collect the right kind of data. An experienced team like the one from Merit will begin the process by understanding your needs, the purposes for which you need the data, and then create customised tools to deliver the right data in the format you need.
• Scalability of Data Collection: As your needs grow, you will need to scale up your data collection process as well. By outsourcing it to a reliable partner like Merit, you can keep your costs low but increase the value as well as scale up or down based on your business needs.
• Data Quality Validation:  As mentioned earlier, web scraping does not overcome the quality issues of data. An experienced team of data scientists can ensure and validate data quality before it is used for analytics and decision-making.
• Greater Focus on Core Functions: While you leave data collection, data validation, and data processing to the experts, you can continue to focus on the core areas of your business and improve your team’s productivity and efficiency using the data and analytics we provide.

Merit Data & Technology has been delivering data solutions to clients for over 15 years across a range of industries, from maritime to construction, fashion and E-commerce.  The company has developed a number of automated data collection solutions,  in addition to machine learning tools  that help our clients transform raw data into usable and valuable intelligence.

Our Managing Director and CEO, Con Conlon is speaking at  OxyCon , a two-day conference on the Future of Web Scraping. To register for this session where Con will be speaking with Alan O’Neil of The Data Works,  book your place here.

Related Case Studies

Sales and marketing data analysis and build for increased market share.

A leading provider of insights, business intelligence, and worldwide B2B events organiser wanted to understand their market share/penetration in the global market for six of their core target industry sectors. This challenge was apparent due to the client not having relevant tech tools or the resources to source and analyse data.

High-Speed Machine Learning Image Processing and Attribute Extraction for Fashion Retail Trends

A world-leading authority on forecasting consumer and design trends had the challenge of collecting, aggregating and reporting on millions of fashion products spanning multiple categories and sub-categories within 24 hours of them being published online.

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20 Web Scraping Projects Ideas for 2024

In this article, you will find a list of interesting web scraping projects that are fun and easy to implement. The list has worthwhile web scraping projects for both beginners and intermediate professionals. The projects have been divided into categories so that you can quickly pick one as per your requirements. 

Loan Eligibility Prediction Project using Machine learning on GCP

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Table of Contents

Useful web scraping projects for beginners, fun web scraping projects for final year students, python web scraping projects, machine learning web scraping projects, interesting web scraping projects for intermediate professionals, web scraping projects on github, web scraping projects for raspberry pi, significance of web scraping projects in data science, is web scraping legal, is web scraping free, what are some popular web scraping projects on github, what is the best free web scraping tool, top 20 web scraping project ideas.

Let us say you just are running a small business, and you are not able to grow your business and reach the relevant audience. You think of upscaling your growth by analyzing your competitors’ customers, but you don’t know how to find them. You don’t need to worry much because your problem can be solved quickly, all thanks to Web Scraping. Web Scraping is the method of extracting data from websites in an automated way. It is readily becoming a popular tool for increasing a business’ growth as by using web scraping, one can know their competitors’ customers and target them for advertisements.

We will now start with our list of interesting web scraping projects to help you explore its various applications. The list contains 20 projects that have been classified into the following categories:

Web Scraping Projects GitHub

Web Scraping Projects for Raspberry Pi

New Projects

If you have just started searching for web scraping and are interested in working on beginner web scraping projects, this section is for you. Below you will find projects that are meant for a newbie in Web scraping.

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Web Scraping Project Idea #1 Customers Review Analysis

Businesses that want to stay in the market for a long time must value their customers’ feedback. It gives them a fair idea of what their customers are not enjoying and what changes they should make to make them happy.

Project Idea: For this project, you can scrape data for any specific product available on Amazon and analyze its customers’ reviews. After scraping, you can do sentiment analysis and perform the necessary statistical analysis to draw insightful conclusions.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: For this project, we suggest you use Beautiful Soup ( Python’s open-source library ) as it will allow you to crawl the website and extract the review from the Amazon website using HTML tags.

Web Scraping Project Idea #2 Flights Ticket Price Analysis

While planning a vacation, we all desire to spend the minimum on flight tickets, but it is not always possible. One has to pre-plan well in advance to avail of lower prices for aeroplane tickets. But, do you know occasionally, the prices go significantly down at odd timings? If you could understand them, it would mean you will get the chance of booking your tickets near your travel date.

Project Idea: For this project, you can pick a website like Expedia or Kayak, fill in your details using automated fashion, and then crawl the website to extract the price information.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: Python’s Selenium is suitable for performing web scraping in this project. Additionally, you can use Python’s smtplib package to send an email containing the information that you extracted from the website to yourself.

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Web Scraping Project Idea #3 NBA Players Analytics

In North America, the basketball game is enjoyed by its citizens, and most of them take great pleasure in watching NBA (National Basketball Association) basketball league. Like India’s IPL is celebrated among cricket fans throughout the world, NBA is widely recognized among basketball fans.

Project Idea: For this project, you can scrape data from Basketball-Reference.com , which has data for NBA games and WNBA and G League. It contains information about all the basketball players like Field Goal Percentage, Field Goal Attempts, Position in the court, minutes played,, etc.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: The two web scraping libraries that will help you smooth this project’s implementation is BeautifulSoup and Requests of the Python programming language. They allow easy access to websites and parsing of HTML pages.

Recommended Reading: Top 30 Machine Learning Projects Ideas for Beginners in 2021

Many final-year students look for cool projects based on web scraping for their applied courses. This section has listed project ideas that a student can consider for their final year project.

Web Scraping Project Idea #4 Automated Product Price Comparison

Many of us look to fall for exciting deals on Flash sale days of eCommerce websites only to realize later that the prices are usually down for that product on no sale days. To grab those exciting and rare deals, one needs to constantly analyze product prices to come across the perfect buying opportunity.

Project Idea: You can build a system that collects the prices of a product from different eCommerce websites and prepares a list of them. A buyer can then analyze the list to decide which website they should purchase the product from.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: You can explore the web scraping software Octoparse for this project. It is free for life SaaS web data platform with pre-defined methods to extract data from eCommerce websites like Amazon, eBay, etc.

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Web Scraping Project Idea #5 Analysing Competitors’ Customers

We discussed the challenge faced by small businesses in expanding their business at the beginning of this blog. As pointed out earlier, they can analyze their competitors’ customers pattern and make relevant changes to their business model accordingly.

Project Idea: For this project, you can scrape data from SEO crawlers, websites that extract information about various web pages like their performance metrics (number of shares, number of visits, etc.), content length, meta tags, etc. You can use crawlers like Screaming Frog SEO Spider , Netpeak Spider , and SEO PowerSuite (link-assistant.com) .

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: You can scrape the data from the SEO crawlers using Python’s BeautifulSoup.

This section lists projects that one can implement using the Python programming language’s interesting libraries. So if you are specifically looking for web scraping python projects , you will find the list below highly relevant.

Web Scraping Project Idea #6 Sports Analytics

If you are a sports enthusiast who occasionally invests in legal betting, this project idea will interest you. That’s because analyzing sports statistically helps understand which players or teams offer intense competition and are likely to win.

Project Idea: For this project, you can work with America’s National Football League data. The data is available on the NFL website , and you can scrape data from there to extract players’ information.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: This project can be implemented by storing information in a google doc for analysis. For scraping data, you can download ParseHub , which is a free web scraper available online.

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Web Scraping Project Idea #7 Hotel Pricing Analytics

When planning for a vacation, accommodation prices have the highest share from the vacation budget. It is often easy to save on this expense by keeping track of the hotel prices. And, of course, it is difficult to track them manually.

Project Idea: Booking.com is a website that allows travellers to book hotels in various cities worldwide. By scraping data from this website, you can collect information about hotels like their name, type of room, location, etc., and use machine learning algorithms to train a model that learns various features of the hotels and predicts the prices.

Web Scraping Tool: For this project, the Python requests library will be an excellent pick to scrape the HTML content of the webpage and SelectorLib library as well for extracting YAML files that will be generated when you will download the HTML content.

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Web Scraping Project Idea #8 Online-Game Review Analysis

With COVID-19  in place, the gaming industry saw a massive bump in its users. To keep the users hooked to their games and not lose them to other entertainment options, the analysts have to keep track of the customer reviews.

Project Idea: You can do a web scraping project with the data available on the STREAM game store . The store hosts about 10,000 games and has reviews from nearly 4 million game users. The website has a product listings page that you can use to extract metadata of the games it hosts.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: For this project, Python programming language’s Scrapy is a good option. You can control the way you want to crawl the game store page using Scrapy’s CrawlSpider.

Web Scraping Project Idea #9 Web Scraping Crypto Prices

Cryptocurrency is a hot topic among investors considering its fluctuating prices. Even Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, tweeted about one of the most popular cryptocurrencies available. Additionally, Raghu Ram Rajan, the world’s renowned economist, recently commented that cryptocurrency holds a decent future and can become an effective means of payment.

Project Idea: For this project, we have an exciting website for you that hosts all the relevant information for cryptocurrencies like NFT, their last seven days’ trend, etc. One can find these details on CoinMarketCap .

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: If you are looking forward to implementing this project in Python , it can be easily implemented using Python’s BeautifulSoup.

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This section has cool web scraping projects that will introduce you to insightful projects for web scraping and motivate you to learn the application of machine learning algorithms to the data you scrape. So, read this section if you are looking for projects that imbibe the application of machine learning algorithms in them.

Recommended Reading: 8 Machine Learning Projects to Practice for August 2021 

Web Scraping Project Idea #10 News Aggregation

With so many different news channels popping up, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of all kinds of news that highlight relevant happenings worldwide. We all have our favourites for news channels, but no one channel has it all.

Project Idea: This web scraping project will involve building a customized one-stop solution for relevant news from all around the world. You can pick websites that you prefer and scrape data from them to gather news. The next step would be to use a text summariser machine learning NLP-based project and submit relevant news.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: You can use the Web Content Extractor for this project. Web Content Extractor is a simple web scraping tool that offers a free 14-day trial service.

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Web Scraping Project Idea #11 House Price Prediction

Buying a house is a dream for most working professionals. But, most of them turn their backs towards them when they look at the prices. Buying a home requires a heavy investment, but you can save a decent amount of money by planning.

Project Idea: As a case study, you can take the Portuguese website CASA SAPO , a real estate website that hosts listings of houses available for sale.

Web Scraping Tool: For this project, the best-suited programming language is Python because of its two fantastic web scraping-related libraries: BeautifulSoup and Requests.

Web Scraping Project Idea #12 Word Frequency Distribution for Novels

Natural Language Processing is a component of Artificial Intelligence that deals with training computers to understand the natural language of humans. It has gained popularity for its exciting applications like sentiment analysis , text summarisation, etc.

Project Idea: This project will revolve around applying NLP methods and web scraping techniques in one go. You can scrape textual data from novels that are available freely on the web and plot interesting statistics like Word Frequency distribution, which gives insights about which words the author commonly uses. For this project, you can use the website Project Gutenberg that has free ebooks of many novels.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: The web scraping tool again for this project is Python’s BeautifulSoup. For NLP methods, you can use its other library, NLTK.

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Web Scraping Project Idea #13 Political Data Analytics

People are no longer restricted to making friends on social media websites; the sites have also become a platform for people to voice their opinions. Digital movements like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, etc., have been recognized worldwide and discussed widely on a global level. Political parties have also realized the importance of social media influence, and thus, there is a significant inclination towards utilizing social media data to understand a party’s impact.

Project Idea: For this project, you can pick a social media platform like Twitter, Facebook, etc., and scrape the public posts to analyze the generic sentiments of a country’s citizens towards a specific political party.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: You can implement this project in R programming language and use its Rfacebook package to scrape data from Facebook’s API.

For intermediate professionals, this section has web scraping python example projects that can solve business problems. These projects are professionally relevant, and you will enjoy learning about exciting web scraping tools.

Web Scraping Project Idea #14 Equity Research Analysis

Equity Research involves thorough analysis and understanding of a company’s financial documents like balance sheet, profit and loss statement, cash flow statements, etc., of the past few years. That helps portfolio managers to be sure of the investments in a company of their interest.

Project Idea: Most companies have an Investor Relation section on their website with their annual financial statements. For this project, you can refer to Walt Disney’s Investor Relation webpage and scrape the PDFs available to understand how the company is evolving financially.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: For this project, we recommend the popular package of Python’s programming language, Beautiful Soup. Additionally, since you must extract content from the PDFs, you will have to use another package, PyPDF2, that has the PdfFileReader class.

Web Scraping Project Idea #15 Drug Recommendation System

One usually walks into a pharmacy and asks for medicines that their doctors have pre-prescribed for simple health problems like body ache, a runny nose, or a headache. But, often, the same medication is not available everywhere, and it is difficult to reach out to your doctor for such minor problems. In that case, looking at the drugs of a few other medicines that might help us resolve our minor issues is not a bad idea.

Project Idea: Using WebMD’s database, you can build a drug recommendation system . The website has authentic content for medical news and the drug components of several medicines you can scrape to realize this project’s solution.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: Using Python’s web scraping framework, Scrapy, you can download the website’s content for one of the most interesting web scraping with python projects.

Web Scraping Project Idea #16 Market Analysis for Hedge Funds Investment

Hedge funds are usually considered a risky investment option involving a few individuals coming forward to invest in various assets, bonds, equities, etc., and are managed by a professional manager. The interest rate is not precisely predictable for these funds, so one needs to perform extensive research to understand the risk involved.

Project Idea: Casual opinion of a business often unexpectedly affects the businesses’ stock prices. Thus, for this project, one can scrape data from a website like Reddit, where people usually discuss almost everything. You can scrape the ‘Daily Discussion’ thread and the financial news/views section.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: Selenium’s web driver in the Python programming language will work very well for this project.

If you are entirely new to the idea of web scraping and are searching for a web scraping projects tutorial, you must refer to the project ideas mentioned in this section. This section has projects whose solutions you can easily find on GitHub. For your convenience, we have mentioned one relevant GitHub repository for each of these web scraping project ideas.

Web Scraping Project Idea #17 Movies Review Analysis

Most of us enjoy watching movies to entertain ourselves on the weekends after a hectic weekday. While sometimes we stick to our classic favourites, often we look for something new and interesting. To know what will best suit us, we quickly google and check out the movies’ reviews.

Project Idea: You can build your personalized movie review analyzer that will utilize the IMDB ratings and scan the reviews to help you decide your next movie for the coming weekend. Additionally, you can perform sentiment analysis on the reviews as well to gain deeper insights.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: For this project, you can scrape the data from OMDb API or the IMDb website using the IMDb ID of the movies. You can use the Beautiful Soup package of Python for this project. 

GitHub Repository: Web-Scraping and Movie Review Analysis by Shehzada Alam

Web Scraping Project Idea #18 Building a Job Search Portal

We already have so many websites like LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc., that host so many job opportunities every day. But have you ever noticed that usually, they all contain different jobs? So, how about we scrap the data from these websites to build a collective job search portal?

Project Idea: For this project, you should scrap popular job portal websites and obtain information like the date of the job posting, salary details, job industry, company name, etc. You can then store and present this information on your website. Recommended Web Scraping Tool: For this project implementation, you can use Scrapy, a library in the Python programming language that allows its programmers to scrape data from any website. The exciting feature of Scrapy is that it offers an asynchronous networking library so you can move on to the following next set of tasks before they are complete.

GitHub Repository: Web-scraping Job Portal sites by Ashish Kapil

Web Scraping Project Idea #19 Analysing Company Financials

If you are in search of projects based on web scraping related to the financial sector , you will enjoy working on this idea. Analyzing a company’s financial statements is crucial if you plan to invest in them directly or indirectly. And with web scraping, you can surely make better decisions.

Project Idea: For this project, you can scrape data of a company you are interested in through the Yahoo Finance website. It is essential that before proceeding with the project idea, you make sure that the company’s data is present in Yahoo’s database.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: Python’ Beautiful Soup and Selenium will be a good pick for implementing this project as Yahoo Finance uses JavaScript. Selenium is a tool that is compatible with Python and can be used to run web browsers automatically.

GitHub Repository: Analysis of company financials from the Yahoo Finance webpage by Randy Macaraeg

Recommended Reading: 15 Machine Learning Projects GitHub for Beginners in 2021

This section has projects that you will find helpful if you are looking for projects that will motivate you to learn how to deploy web scraping projects in Raspberry pi. We have listed brainstorming projects that will help you in upgrading your skills.

Web Scraping Project Idea #20 SEO Monitoring

Optimizing content for keyword search on a search engine is crucial for businesses that even small companies are actively investing their time and energy in it. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is proving to be a game-changer for many companies. 

Project Idea: Monitoring content is straightforward if you analyze the rankings of your website for targetted keywords through scraping popular search engines like Google, Bing, etc. In this project, you will have to extract HTML links, meta tags, title tags, etc., of the web pages that pop up when searching for targetted keywords.

Recommended Web Scraping Tool: For this project, you can use Python’s Scrapy, a free web scraping tool in the Python programming language. Additionally, if you want the information to be sent to you periodically, you can deploy it on Raspberry Pi, which will run it after a specified time lag.

Access Job Recommendation System Project with Source Code

When working on data science -related projects, it is not always possible to have a pre-polished dataset that one can use for solving problems. In such cases, it is always recommended to build your dataset by scraping relevant websites. Thus, you must work on as many web scraping projects as possible if you wish to become a successful data scientist. Here are a few instances of industries where you can utilize your web scraping techniques:

Finance: Here, financial managers use web scraping methods to analyze stock prices and in an attempt to predict them using machine learning algorithms.

Real-Estate: They use web scraping techniques to inspect what factors influence the the prices of houses, plots, etc.

Gaming: Gaming industry members utilize web scraping to understand their customers’ feedback and make necessary changes in their games accordingly.

Sports: Sports data is often analyzed by programmers to guide people who are interested in legal betting.

Entertainment: Entertainment industry heavily relies on its customers’ reviews for high viewership. It is thus crucial for them to constantly invest in analyzing their customers’ feedback through web scraping.

FAQs on Web Scraping

Yes, web scraping is legal as long as you are scraping public data. Popular search engines like Google, Bing, etc., scrape websites every day to curate search results for their users.

Yes, web scraping is free if you are willing to code in programming languages and do it the hard way. If you want quick solutions, then a few software like Octoparse, ParseHub, and ScrapingBee offer paid services and make web scraping easier.

Popular web scraping projects on GitHub include Building a customized job search portal, analyzing a company’s financial documents, and Analysing movie reviews.

Scrapy, ParseHub, Scraper API. OctoParse, Webhose.io, Common Crawl, Mozenda, Content Grabber are a few of the best web scraping tools available for free.

About the Author

Manika Nagpal is a versatile professional with a strong background in both Physics and Data Science. As a Senior Analyst at ProjectPro, she leverages her expertise in data science and writing to create engaging and insightful blogs that help businesses and individuals stay up-to-date with the

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