The groundwork for an effective, modern business environment is the rapid movement of information. Success in most fields can be encapsulated in a well-known, abstract phrase – knowledge is power. Business history shows us obvious tendencies, that businesses with superior physical and intellectual resources always have an upper hand over their competitors.
However, there are a few factors and ground-breaking inventions that changed the way companies do business. The success of companies in the XXI century has both traditional and modern attributes that make them great. If we compare the rate of progress and innovation, modern businesses grow exponentially faster. But what are the reasons that allow us to develop new, superior products and services quicker than ever before?
The secret lies in the methods of information collection, analysis, and an appropriate level of competition. If we compare tradesmen and enterprises to modern businesses, the inferior circumstances limit the ability to fulfill these criteria. The free movement of information helps our bright minds think outside the box and create new ideas that change the world. Certain societal and religious taboos that limit science practices discourage the majority of the population from focusing on critical thinking and analysis that leads to improvement. And last but not least, centralization of power and resources drastically reduces the level of competition, which encourages maintaining superiority over others instead of focusing on progress and innovation.
The modern business environment creates a far greater level of competition because information technologies equalize the opportunities to acquire knowledge. With access to the internet, which feels like an endless, ever-growing network of information, businesses co-exist in the digital world due to the many benefits it brings.
Today, companies use access to public information to conduct market research, which allows them to create the best possible circumstances to grow their product and brand. In this article, we will focus on the importance of market research for modern businesses and the necessary tools for its successful conduction. Just like most internet users, businesses use search engines to quickly access valuable public information, but some tools speed up the process of data aggregation. For example, Google scraper or any other web scraper tool can automate information collection from search engines to save time and resources. However, businesses and interested individuals that plan to use a google scraper need to understand what goes behind the scenes when they make data requests to web servers and potential barriers they might encounter. Let’s take a deeper look at how successful businesses approach market research.
Reliance on automation
Automation is the key to successful market research. Manual collection of information has its advantages: employees that go through potentially valuable data can analyze and make conclusions on the spot. However, the modern internet contains more information than any human could ever process in multiple lifetimes. To get better in their market, companies use automated software to extract valuable information from their competitors and search engines.
Of course, automation still has disadvantages that require technical solutions to create a well-functioning data extraction machine. While the whole process of data extraction and analysis can be manually conducted by employees, we must segment aggregation into steps to get a usable final product. Search engine scrapers can extract public data in HTML format en masse, but the code has no analytical value until parsers turn it into a usable and understandable composition.
And this is where the problems with automation start to arise. While simple code extraction does not need sophisticated programming solutions, data parsing rarely succumbs to complete automation. A casual web user might not see the difference, but even similar websites on the internet often have differences in their structure. While a company can build a parser that successfully parses information from one code, it can fail to extract data from a different web page. That is why data parsing is the most resource-intensive step in web scraping and market research: because it cannot be fully automated, businesses need technically proficient staff that builds and adjusts parsers to keep them operational for all targets of interest. Despite these difficulties, automated search engine scraping is the key to successful market research.
Modern businesses need proxy servers
While search engine scrapers collect more information than real users, they send a lot more data requests to targeted third parties. Because it can slow down the functionality of a web page, search engine server owners try to prevent scraping by banning their IP addresses. To prevent data extraction interruptions and protect their network identity, businesses use search engine proxies supplied by reliable proxy server providers. Instead of using their main IP, companies get a pool of proxy IPs with customizable parameters to create optimal circumstances for fast, undisturbed data extraction. With automated search engine scrapers and intermediary servers that ensure their intended functionality, modern businesses can quickly collect and update necessary information for market research.
