I have been working as a data scientist for years now and learned that most of the data your company needs might be already available on the Internet. A software developer could easily write a custom script to retrieve it. But typically, you do not even need to learn to code to retrieve your desired data. This is what my experience as an engineer focused on data collection taught me.
That is possible thanks to the many no-code tools that have been developed over the last few years. These tools allow you to perform your data collection operations easily and without a single line of code. So, data collection is now easier than ever. Let’s learn why and with which tools.
Retrieving Data Publicly Exposed Through the Web
More and more data is publicly accessible through the web. Consequently, many processes, tools, and techniques aimed at recovering this data are now available. This is what web scraping is about.
Web scraping, also known as web extraction or harvesting, is a technique to extract data from the World Wide Web (WWW) and save it to a file system or database for later retrieval or analysis. Commonly, web data is scrapped utilizing Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or through a web browser. This is accomplished either manually by a user or automatically by a bot or web crawler — Encyclopedia of Big Data
In other words, web scraping is the process of recovering data that is currently available through the Web. For example, on a web page. Typically, this also involves transforming the data into more convenient formats, such as Excel files.
Watch the video below if you want to learn more about web scraping:
Web scraping may sound very complex to you, and something that only a highly-qualified software developer could accomplish. This used to be true, but it is no longer the case. Let’s understand why.
The Rise of No-Code Tools
No-code platforms allow you to perform tasks and operations that used to involve programming without a single line of code. Generally, these platforms help the user create applications by connecting and configuring pre-defined components with a simple drag-and-drop UI (User Interface). Also, as found out by this research, some of these platforms are starting to adopt AI (Artificial Intelligence) to predict what the user wants, making the whole process even more effortless.
In other terms, anyone can use these platforms, regardless of their skills. Thus, they embody the concept of higher-level programming and the evolution of the traditional development process. In detail, you can see no-code tools as time and money saved. This is because you do not need to have high skills to use them. As a result, you do not have to spend much time learning how to get the most out of them, as would happen with traditional technologies. This is because no-code tools do not have a steep learning curve.
So, the idea behind no-code is that anyone should be able to access, modify, and run an application without needing to learn any programming language. And as a data scientist and software engineer, I fully support this movement. I have adopted and tested many no-code platforms and found them extremely useful. Particularly, when they are used to automatizing repetitive and error-prone processes, such as data collection through web scraping.
So, it should not surprise you that over the last few years, these platforms and services have been widely adopted in many fields, especially when it comes to data extraction, data transformation, or data manipulation.
A Top-Notch No-Code Tool for Data Collection
I have tried many automated web-scraping tools, and I consider Octoparse the perfect no-code tool for data collection. If you need to retrieve some data from one or more static or dynamic websites, transform it, and finally store it in more affordable formats, then I recommend adopting such a tool.
As stated on their official website, Octoparse empowers anyone to extract data from any dynamic website thanks to an intuitive point-and-click interface. In detail, what I like about this software is that it comes with two modes. One is built on top of powerful auto-detection algorithms that allow you to easily achieve your data extraction and collection goals. While the other one is a more advanced mode that you can use for customized needs and allows you to discover the true power of the tool.
Keep in mind that in both cases, you do not need to code. In fact, they both share a point-and-click, drag-and-drop, user-friendly interface built for anyone. Also, Octoparse will guide you throughout the entire data collection process, from the initial extraction to the final saving in the desired format.
Plus, the last major update introduced a new mode called Boost Mode. This allows you to launch multi-thread runs locally to scrape data even faster. In this mode, Octoparse automatically splits your tasks into subtasks and executes them simultaneously to complete the scraping process faster. Then, you can also check for event logs to see what happened during the task and use this info to perform troubleshooting tasks more easily.
In conclusion, Octoparse is a commercial, easy-to-adopt, no-code platform that helps you scrape heterogeneous data extracted from one or many websites effortlessly. As you have just learned, such no-code tools are powerful and increasingly valuable options to achieve all those tasks that previously required advanced and custom applications without writing a line of code. Moreover, when you have finally configured Octoparse to extract the data you want for you, you can let it transform it and manipulate it to meet your needs and finally export it to a local file or to the cloud.
Conclusion
In this article, we delved into why no-code tools may represent the future of data collection. In most cases, the data you require is already available online for free. If you want to extract and acquire it, you need to perform web scraping. This used to involve complex, custom applications aimed at retrieving and transforming your desired data for you.
Fortunately, this is no longer true. In fact, thanks to the rise of the no-code movement, more and more platforms have been developed to help users extract data from the web easily and without coding. In this regard, and based on my experience, Octoparse is the no-code tool for data collection you have been looking for.
Thanks for reading! I hope that you found this article helpful.
