Web Scraper Shortcode WordPress Plugin Review

This short post is on the WP-plugin called Web Scraper Shortcode, that enables one to retrieve a portion of a web page or a whole page and insert it directly into a post. This plugin might be used for getting fresh data or images from web pages for your WordPress driven page without even visiting it. More scraping plugins and sowtware you can find in here.

To install it in WordPress go to Plugins -> Add New.
Usage

The plugin scrapes the page content and applies parameters to this scraped page if specified. To use the plugin just insert the

[web-scraper ]

shortcode into the HTML view of the WordPress page where you want to display the excerpts of a page or the whole page. The parameters are as follows:

    url (self explanatory)
    element – the dom navigation element notation, similar to XPath.
    limit – the maximum number of elements to be scraped and inserted if the element notation points to several of them (like elements of the same class).

The use of the plugin is of the dom (Data Object Model) notation, where consecutive dom nodes are stated like node1.node2; for example: element = ‘div.img’. The specific element scrape goes thru ‘#notation’. Example: if you want to scrape several ‘div’ elements of the class ‘red’ (<div class=’red’>…<div>), you need to specify the element attribute this way: element = ‘div#red’.
How to find DOM notation?

But for inexperienced users, how is it possible to find the dom notation of the desired element(s) from the web page? Web Developer Tools are a handy means for this. I would refer you to this paragraph on how to invoke Web Developer Tools in the browser (Google Chrome) and select a single page element to inspect it. As you select it with the ‘loupe’ tool, on the bottom line you’ll see the blue box with the element’s dom notation:


The plugin content

As one who works with web scraping, I was curious about  the means that the plugin uses for scraping. As I looked at the plugin code, it turned out that the plugin acquires a web page through ‘simple_html_dom‘ class:

    require_once(‘simple_html_dom.php’);
    $html = file_get_html($url);
    then the code performs iterations over the designated elements with the set limit

Pitfalls

    Be careful if you put two or more [web-scraper] shortcodes on your website, since downloading other pages will drastically slow the page load speed. Even if you want only a small element, the PHP engine first loads the whole page and then iterates over its elements.
    You need to remember that many pictures on the web are indicated by shortened URLs. So when such an image gets extracted it might be visible to you in this way: , since the URL is shortened and the plugin does not take note of  its base URL.
    The error “Fatal error: Call to a member function find() on a non-object …” will occur if you put this shortcode in a text-overloaded post.

Summary

I’d recommend using this plugin for short posts to be added with other posts’ elements. The use of this plugin is limited though.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/web-scraper-shortcode-wordpress-plugin-review/

Microsys A1 Website Scraper Review

The A1 scraper by Microsys is a program that is mainly used to scrape websites to extract data in large quantities for later use in webservices. The scraper works to extract text, URLs etc., using multiple Regexes and saving the output into a CSV file. This tool is can be compared with other web harvesting and web scraping services.
How it works
This scraper program works as follows:
Scan mode

    Go to the ScanWebsite tab and enter the site’s URL into the Path subtab.
    Press the ‘Start scan‘ button to cause the crawler to find text, links and other data on this website and cache them.

Important: URLs that you scrape data from have to pass filters defined in both analysis filters and output filters. The defining of those filters can be set at the Analysis filters and Output filters subtabs respectively. They must be set at the website analysis stage (mode).
Extract mode

    Go to the Scraper Options tab
    Enter the Regex(es) into the Regex input area.
    Define the name and path of the output CSV file.
    The scraper automatically finds and extracts the data according to Regex patterns.

The result will be stored in one CSV file for all the given URLs.

There is a need to mention that the set of regular expressions will be run against all the pages scraped.
Some more scraper features

Using the scraper as a website crawler also affords:

    URL filtering.
    Adjustment of the speed of crawling according to service needs rather than server load.

If  you need to extract data from a complex website, just disable Easy mode: out press the  button. A1 Scraper’s full tutorial is available here.
Conclusion

The A1 Scraper is good for mass gathering of URLs, text, etc., with multiple conditions set. However this scraping tool is designed for using only Regex expressions, which can increase the parsing process time greatly.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/microsys-a1-website-scraper-review/

Visual Web Ripper: Using External Input Data Sources

Sometimes it is necessary to use external data sources to provide parameters for the scraping process. For example, you have a database with a bunch of ASINs and you need to scrape all product information for each one of them. As far as Visual Web Ripper is concerned, an input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values.

An input data source is normally used in one of these scenarios:

    To provide a list of input values for a web form
    To provide a list of start URLs
    To provide input values for Fixed Value elements
    To provide input values for scripts

Visual Web Ripper supports the following input data sources:

    SQL Server Database
    MySQL Database
    OleDB Database
    CSV File
    Script (A script can be used to provide data from almost any data source)

To see it in action you can download a sample project that uses an input CSV file with Amazon ASIN codes to generate Amazon start URLs and extract some product data. Place both the project file and the input CSV file in the default Visual Web Ripper project folder (My Documents\Visual Web Ripper\Projects).

For further information please look at the manual topic, explaining how to use an input data source to generate start URLs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/visual-web-ripper-using-external-input-data-sources/

Using External Input Data in Off-the-shelf Web Scrapers

There is a question I’ve wanted to shed some light upon for a long time already: “What if I need to scrape several URL’s based on data in some external database?“.

For example, recently one of our visitors asked a very good question (thanks, Ed):

    “I have a large list of amazon.com asin. I would like to scrape 10 or so fields for each asin. Is there any web scraping software available that can read each asin from a database and form the destination url to be scraped like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/{asin} and scrape the data?”

This question impelled me to investigate this matter. I contacted several web scraper developers, and they kindly provided me with detailed answers that allowed me to bring the following summary to your attention:
Visual Web Ripper

An input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values. You can find the additional information here.
Web Content Extractor

You can use the -at”filename” command line option to add new URLs from TXT or CSV file:

    WCExtractor.exe projectfile -at”filename” -s

projectfile: the file name of the project (*.wcepr) to open.
filename – the file name of the CSV or TXT file that contains URLs separated by newlines.
-s – starts the extraction process

You can find some options and examples here.
Mozenda

Since Mozenda is cloud-based, the external data needs to be loaded up into the user’s Mozenda account. That data can then be easily used as part of the data extracting process. You can construct URLs, search for strings that match your inputs, or carry through several data fields from an input collection and add data to it as part of your output. The easiest way to get input data from an external source is to use the API to populate data into a Mozenda collection (in the user’s account). You can also input data in the Mozenda web console by importing a .csv file or importing one through our agent building tool.

Once the data is loaded into the cloud, you simply initiate building a Mozenda web agent and refer to that Data list. By using the Load page action and the variable from the inputs, you can construct a URL like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/%asin%.
Helium Scraper

Here is a video showing how to do this with Helium Scraper:

The video shows how to use the input data as URLs and as search terms. There are many other ways you could use this data, way too many to fit in a video. Also, if you know SQL, you could run a query to get the data directly from an external MS Access database like
SELECT * FROM [MyTable] IN "C:\MyDatabase.mdb"

Note that the database needs to be a “.mdb” file.
WebSundew Data Extractor
Basically this allow
s using input data from external data sources. This may be CSV, Excel file or a Database (MySQL, MSSQL, etc). Here you can see how to do this in the case of an external file, but you can do it with a database in a similar way (you just need to write an SQL script that returns the necessary data).
In addition to passing URLs from the external sources you can pass other input parameters as well (input fields, for example).
Screen Scraper

Screen Scraper is really designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases. We have composed a separate article where you can find a tutorial and a sample project about scraping Amazon products based on a list of their ASINs.

Source: http://extract-web-data.com/using-external-input-data-in-off-the-shelf-web-scrapers/

A simple way to turn a website into JSON

Recently, while surfing the web I stumbled upon an simple web scraping service named Web Scrape Master. It is a kind of RESTful web service that extracts data from a specified web site and returns it to you in JSON format.
How it works

Though I don’t know what this service may be useful for, I still like its simplicity: all you need to do is to make an HTTP GET request, passing all necessary parameters in the query string:
http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url={url}&xpath={xpath}&attr={attr}&callback={callback}

    url  - the URL of the website you want to scrape
    xpath – xpath determining the data you need to extract
    attr - attribute the name you need to get the value of (optional)
    callback - JSON callback function (optional)

For example, for the following request to our testing ground:

http://webscrapemaster.com/api/?url=http://testing-ground.extract-web-data.com/blocks&xpath=//div[@id=case1]/div[1]/span[1]/div

You will get the following response:

[{"text":"<div class='name'>Dell Latitude D610-1.73 Laptop Wireless Computer</div>","attrs":{"class":"name"}}]
Visual Web Scraper

Also, this service offers a special visual tool for building such requests. All you need to do is to enter the URL of the website and click to the element you need to scrape:
Visual Web Scraper
Conclusion

Though I understand that the developer of this service is attempting to create a simple web scraping service, it is still hard to imagine where it can be useful. The task that the service does can be easily accomplished by means of any language.

Probably if you already have software receiving JSON from the web, and you want to feed it with data from some website, then you may find this service useful. The other possible application is to hide your IP when you do web scraping. If you have other ideas, it would be great if you shared them with us.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/a-simple-way-to-turn-a-website-into-json/

Selenium IDE and Web Scraping

Selenium is a browser automation framework that includes IDE, Remote Control server and bindings of various flavors including Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and other. In this post we touch on the basic structure of the framework and its application to  Web Scraping.
What is Selenium IDE


Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox plugin, and it allows recording browsers’ interactions in order to edit them. This works well for software tests, composing and debugging. The Selenium Remote Control is a server specific for a particular environment; it causes custom scripts to be implemented for controlled browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and iOS. How various Selenium components are supported with major browsers read here.
What does Selenium do and Web Scraping

Basically Selenium automates browsers. This ability is no doubt to be applied to web scraping. Since browsers (and Selenium) support JavaScript, jQuery and other methods working with dynamic content why not use this mix for benefit in web scraping, rather than to try to catch Ajax events with plain code? The second reason for this kind of scrape automation is browser-fasion data access (though today this is emulated with most libraries).

Yes, Selenium works to automate browsers, but how to control Selenium from a custom script to automate a browser for web scraping? There are Selenium PHP and other language libraries (bindings) providing for scripts to call and use Selenium. It is possible to write Selenium clients (using the libraries) in almost any language we prefer, for example Perl, Python, Java, PHP etc. Those libraries (API), along with a server, the Java written server that invokes browsers for actions, constitute the Selenum RC (Remote Control). Remote Control automatically loads the Selenium Core into the browser to control it. For more details in Selenium components refer to here.



A tough scrape task for programmer

“…cURL is good, but it is very basic.  I need to handle everything manually; I am creating HTTP requests by hand.
This gets difficult – I need to do a lot of work to make sure that the requests that I send are exactly the same as the requests that a browser would
send, both for my sake and for the website’s sake. (For my sake
because I want to get the right data, and for the website’s sake
because I don’t want to cause error messages or other problems on their site because I sent a bad request that messed with their web application).  And if there is any important javascript, I need to imitate it with PHP.
It would be a great benefit to me to be able to control a browser like Firefox with my code. It would solve all my problems regarding the emulation of a real browser…
it seems that Selenium will allow me to do this…” -Ryan S

Yes, that’s what we will consider below.
Scrape with Selenium

In order to create scripts that interact with the Selenium Server (Selenium RC, Selenium Remote Webdriver) or create local Selenium WebDriver script, there is the need to make use of language-specific client drivers (also called Formatters, they are included in the selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi package). The Selenium servers, drivers and bindings are available at Selenium download page.
The basic recipe for scrape with Selenium:

    Use Chrome or Firefox browsers
    Get Firebug or Chrome Dev Tools (Cntl+Shift+I) in action.
    Install requirements (Remote control or WebDriver, libraries and other)
    Selenium IDE : Record a ‘test’ run thru a site, adding some assertions.
    Export as a Python (other language) script.
    Edit it (loops, data extraction, db input/output)
    Run script for the Remote Control

The short intro Slides for the scraping of tough websites with Python & Selenium are here (as Google Docs slides) and here (Slide Share).
Selenium components for Firefox installation guide

For how to install the Selenium IDE to Firefox see  here starting at slide 21. The Selenium Core and Remote Control installation instructions are there too.
Extracting for dynamic content using jQuery/JavaScript with Selenium

One programmer is doing a similar thing …

1. launch a selenium RC (remote control) server
2. load a page
3. inject the jQuery script
4. select the interested contents using jQuery/JavaScript
5. send back to the PHP client using JSON.

He particularly finds it quite easy and convenient to use jQuery for
screen scraping, rather than using PHP/XPath.
Conclusion

The Selenium IDE is the popular tool for browser automation, mostly for its software testing application, yet also in that Web Scraping techniques for tough dynamic websites may be implemented with IDE along with the Selenium Remote Control server. These are the basic steps for it:

    Record the ‘test‘ browser behavior in IDE and export it as the custom programming language script
    Formatted language script runs on the Remote Control server that forces browser to send HTTP requests and then script catches the Ajax powered responses to extract content.

Selenium based Web Scraping is an easy task for small scale projects, but it consumes a lot of memory resources, since for each request it will launch a new browser instance.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/selenium-ide-and-web-scraping/

Data Entry Services Are Meant To Ease Your Workload

Data entry services provided by the firms are growing very rapidly with a huge demand. It may sound that data entry is a simple task to do but it is not so simple and plays an important role in running a successful business. We all know that data and information related to any company is very crucial for them. Data are priceless for any firm, no-matter they are small or big. The companies provide you highly customized business solutions depending on your requirement.

The companies also provide various range of services for all kinds of textual data capturing from printed matter, manuscripts, and even web research. Very advanced technologies are used to convert large quantities of paper work and image based task to electronic data that is usable in database and in the management system. Any kind of data is very essential for an organization whether it is manual or electronic.

There are many companies that provide highly accurate data entry services with complete confidentiality and high level of accuracy. These services are undertaken by banks, retail organizations, medical research facilities, universities, insurance companies, newspapers, large corporate enterprises, direct marketing and database marketing firms, school and trade associations to make their organization a successful and profitable enterprise.

Outsourcing is a business strategy which is highly being used by businesses to take care of the data entry services. In fact, the process of outsourcing has made things simpler for business owners and the businesses are running successfully. The companies that are involved in outsourcing work do provide these services efficiently to those firms who are burdened with heavy workload. If you are running a business of your own and want to manage it properly and run smoothly, then all you need to do is to hire data entry services.

Availing the benefits of outsourcing works in the form of data entry services can prove tremendous for your company. If you outsource your extra burden of work to a company then in such case, you can make growth plans and strategies for your organization. The companies will console you about the high quality of services and the accuracy they provide for the business that needs data to be extracted from any source.

Data entry services is an information technology enabled services that provides you wide range of services. The professionals working for you are trained and extremely talented who are ready to provide you high end services with full dedication. Since, you are spending money for this, so you must take the best services and choose those companies who can cater to your needs according to you.

Data entry services is not a complex application but it's extremely time taking and this the main reason for a company that hires this service so that they can save their time and money. Every business has many more things to consider for their growth prospects and for this reason they don't want to waste their time and money in such stuffs. The professionals are especially trained according to the requirement of the work depending on how critical the work is. Hiring for this service is definitely a wise decision for your business prospects. These types of services will surely help you to make big profits in the business. The strategy and techniques applied to any business is the key to success.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Services-Are-Meant-To-Ease-Your-Workload&id=538877

Data Mining's Importance in Today's Corporate Industry

A large amount of information is collected normally in business, government departments and research & development organizations. They are typically stored in large information warehouses or bases. For data mining tasks suitable data has to be extracted, linked, cleaned and integrated with external sources. In other words, it is the retrieval of useful information from large masses of information, which is also presented in an analyzed form for specific decision-making.

Data mining is the automated analysis of large information sets to find patterns and trends that might otherwise go undiscovered. It is largely used in several applications such as understanding consumer research marketing, product analysis, demand and supply analysis, telecommunications and so on. Data Mining is based on mathematical algorithm and analytical skills to drive the desired results from the huge database collection.

It can be technically defined as the automated mining of hidden information from large databases for predictive analysis. Web mining requires the use of mathematical algorithms and statistical techniques integrated with software tools.

Data mining includes a number of different technical approaches, such as:

    Clustering
    Data Summarization
    Learning Classification Rules
    Finding Dependency Networks
    Analyzing Changes
    Detecting Anomalies

The software enables users to analyze large databases to provide solutions to business decision problems. Data mining is a technology and not a business solution like statistics. Thus the data mining software provides an idea about the customers that would be intrigued by the new product.

It is available in various forms like text, web, audio & video data mining, pictorial data mining, relational databases, and social networks. Data mining is thus also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases since it involves searching for implicit information in large databases. The main kinds of data mining software are: clustering and segmentation software, statistical analysis software, text analysis, mining and information retrieval software and visualization software.

Data Mining therefore has arrived on the scene at the very appropriate time, helping these enterprises to achieve a number of complex tasks that would have taken up ages but for the advent of this marvelous new technology.

Our web research provides detailed information on data mining, business intelligence data mining, web data mining, online data research, web research services. We will closely work with you; we guarantee clear, focused and relevant information that meets your specifications. If you want to know about our web research services, please visit us: http://www.outsourcingwebresearch.com.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Minings-Importance-in-Todays-Corporate-Industry&id=2057401

Data Extraction Software Explained in Plain English

Data Extraction Software is designed to automatically collect data from web pages. A lot of money can be made with Data Extraction Software, but there are two types of program - custom made and typical.

Custom made solutions are designed by developers to extract from one particular source and they can't automatically adjust to another. So for example, if we are to create a custom-build data extraction program for website A, it won't work for website B, because they have different structures. Such custom made solutions cost more money than the standard ones, but they are designed for more complicated and unique situations.

Every data extraction program is based on an algorithm that has to be programmed in such a way that it will collect all the needed data from a given website. The reason why data extraction is so popular is that it saves on manual labor which can become expensive when outsourced. Data extraction software automates repetitive operations. For example, if you want to extract just the emails of every user in a given website, then you will have to pay a person to repeat the same steps over and over again like a robot. Those steps will most likely include clicking on the same place, then copying to the clipboard a piece of data that always resides on the same place on the screen.

Data extraction software is based on certain constants. By constants, I mean certain facts about a given program that do not change, no matter what. This is perhaps the only drawback of this type of software. But for the time being, it's the only way. The other way is to use artificial intelligence and make software programs think and make decisions like humans. They would have to adapt to new systems and it's almost unthinkable to consider such complicated solutions unless you are working on a very large scale.

The Bottom line here is that data extraction software is able to automate cycled operations that are otherwise expensive if handled by humans. Although the initial investment of money and time might seem expensive, it's definitely worth it in the long run, because your customized software will do the job in much less time, without the need for any human intervention.

So, if you are working on any task on the Internet, and you feel that task could be automated, then data extraction software maybe the solution you have been looking for.

For a deeper look into various data collection methods [http://www.datacollectionsoftwares.com] and more, such as Inventory Stock Control Software [http://www.datacollectionsoftwares.com/inventorystockcontrolsoftware.php], and WMS Software then one click could provide all the answers you've been looking for.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Extraction-Software-Explained-in-Plain-English&id=1477227

What's Your Excuse For Not Using Data Mining?

In an earlier article I briefly described how data mining and RFM analysis can help marketers be more efficient (read... increased marketing ROI!). These marketing analytics tools can significantly help with all direct marketing efforts (multichannel campaign management efforts using direct mail, email and call center) and some interactive marketing efforts as well. So, why aren't all companies using it today? Well, typically it comes down to a lack of data and/or statistical expertise. Even if you don't have data mining expertise, YOU can benefit from data mining by using a consultant. With that in mind, let's tackle the first problem -- collecting and developing the data that is useful for data mining.

The most important data to collect for data mining include:

oTransaction data - For every sale, you at least need to know the product and the amount and date of the purchase.

oPast campaign response data - For every campaign you've run, you need to identify who responded and who didn't. You may need to use direct and indirect response attribution.

oGeo-demographic data - This is optional, but you may want to append your customer file/database with consumer overlay data from companies like Acxiom.

oLifestyle data - This is also an optional append of indicators of socio-economic lifestyle that are developed by companies like Claritas. All of the above data may or may not exist in the same data source. Some companies have a single holistic view of the customer in a database and some don't. If you don't, you'll have to make sure all data sources that contain customer data have the same customer ID/key. That way, all of the needed data can be brought together for data mining.

How much data do you need for data mining? You'll hear many different answers, but I like to have at least 15,000 customer records to have confidence in my results.

Once you have the data, you need to massage it to get it ready to be "baked" by your data mining application. Some data mining applications will automatically do this for you. It's like a bread machine where you put in all the ingredients -- they automatically get mixed, the bread rises, bakes, and is ready for consumption! Some notable companies that do this include KXEN, SAS, and SPSS. Even if you take the automated approach, it's helpful to understand what kinds of things are done to the data prior to model building.

Preparation includes:

oMissing data analysis. What fields have missing values? Should you fill in the missing values? If so, what values do you use? Should the field be used at all?

oOutlier detection. Is "33 children in a household" extreme? Probably - and consequently this value should be adjusted to perhaps the average or maximum number of children in your customer's households.

oTransformations and standardizations. When various fields have vastly different ranges (e.g., number of children per household and income), it's often helpful to standardize or normalize your data to get better results. It's also useful to transform data to get better predictive relationships. For instance, it's common to transform monetary variables by using their natural logs.

oBinning Data. Binning continuous variables is an approach that can help with noisy data. It is also required by some data mining algorithms.

More to come on data mining for marketers in my next article.

Jim Stafford has worked for leading companies in the Marketing Automation space (BI, data mining, campaign management and eMarketing) for over 10 years. He has held roles of Director - Database Marketing Solutions, Pre-Sales Manager, Product Manager, and Solution Architect at companies like Aprimo, Group1 Software, SAS, Siebel, SPSS and Unica. Mr. Stafford has consistently helped sales teams meet or beat established sales targets. He was the principal pre-sales contributor to Siebel's second largest MA sale with General Motors. Jim has had considerable exposure to many verticals including: Financial Services, Hospitality & Entertainment, Automotive, Communications, and Utilities. He is a seasoned expert at discovery and knows key industry trends. Jim has an M.A. Degree in Economics from the University of Maryland and has been a frequent speaker at annual National Center for Database Marketing and Direct Marketing Associations events. Visit [http://www.staffordsbsg.com/] to learn more about Jim and his company's services.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Whats-Your-Excuse-For-Not-Using-Data-Mining?&id=3576029

Outsource Data Entry Services and Reduce Costs

India is known for its efficient and cost effective data entry service companies. As the Internet is expanding its horizon, companies from all over the world are flocking to India and outsourcing data format jobs to different companies. There definitely has to be a strong reason behind the same. Every business needs relevant information and data from trusted sources at a nominal cost. Companies in India have made cost effectiveness their forte and thus offer the best services to their clients around the world at an affordable cost.

One of the main reasons for outsourcing these tasks to India is that you get the aid of extremely qualified experts at an exceptionally low cost. This services can very well be outsourced to India without you having to worry about the quality of work you will receive. The data-entry professionals in these companies are skilled in their work and can help you manage business related data without any errors. Their specialists are well equipped with the latest technologies, both in hardware and software, and thus they can offer you the best results.

The various types of data entry services that you can avail from India are offline and online entry, image entry, entry of e-books, surveys, catalog entry, entry of legal documents, entry of insurance claims, database entry, text entry, accounting, entry of manuals, PDF conversion, HTML conversion, XML conversion and many others such services.

This type of work is a critical part of every organization and has to be done cautiously. Therefore, before outsourcing your data entry services, check for the credibility of the company by reviewing its past records, and customers feedback. Outsourcing services can definitely help you reduce cost and allow you to use your time and employees for more productive work. Important thing is that even outsourcing needs proper care and verification so that you don't have to face any confidentiality and quality issues in future.

This article is written by Abhinav Singh and provided in courtesy of data entry, offering affordable data entry services.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsource-Data-Entry-Services-and-Reduce-Costs&id=5849439

Outsource Data Mining Services to Offshore Data Entry Company

Companies in India offer complete solution services for all type of data mining services.

Data Mining Services and Web research services offered, help businesses get critical information for their analysis and marketing campaigns. As this process requires professionals with good knowledge in internet research or online research, customers can take advantage of outsourcing their Data Mining, Data extraction and Data Collection services to utilize resources at a very competitive price.

In the time of recession every company is very careful about cost. So companies are now trying to find ways to cut down cost and outsourcing is good option for reducing cost. It is essential for each size of business from small size to large size organization. Data entry is most famous work among all outsourcing work. To meet high quality and precise data entry demands most corporate firms prefer to outsource data entry services to offshore countries like India.

In India there are number of companies which offer high quality data entry work at cheapest rate. Outsourcing data mining work is the crucial requirement of all rapidly growing Companies who want to focus on their core areas and want to control their cost.

Why outsource your data entry requirements?

Easy and fast communication: Flexibility in communication method is provided where they will be ready to talk with you at your convenient time, as per demand of work dedicated resource or whole team will be assigned to drive the project.

Quality with high level of Accuracy: Experienced companies handling a variety of data-entry projects develop whole new type of quality process for maintaining best quality at work.

Turn Around Time: Capability to deliver fast turnaround time as per project requirements to meet up your project deadline, dedicated staff(s) can work 24/7 with high level of accuracy.

Affordable Rate: Services provided at affordable rates in the industry. For minimizing cost, customization of each and every aspect of the system is undertaken for efficiently handling work.

Outsourcing Service Providers are outsourcing companies providing business process outsourcing services specializing in data mining services and data entry services. Team of highly skilled and efficient people, with a singular focus on data processing, data mining and data entry outsourcing services catering to data entry projects of a varied nature and type.

Why outsource data mining services?

360 degree Data Processing Operations
Free Pilots Before You Hire
Years of Data Entry and Processing Experience
Domain Expertise in Multiple Industries
Best Outsourcing Prices in Industry
Highly Scalable Business Infrastructure
24X7 Round The Clock Services

The expertise management and teams have delivered millions of processed data and records to customers from USA, Canada, UK and other European Countries and Australia.

Outsourcing companies specialize in data entry operations and guarantee highest quality & on time delivery at the least expensive prices.

Herat Patel, CEO at 3Alpha Dataentry Services possess over 15+ years of experience in providing data related services outsourced to India.

Visit our Facebook Data Entry profile for comments & reviews.

Our services helps to convert any kind of  hard copy sources, our data mining services helps to collect business contacts, customer contact, product specifications etc., from different web sources. We promise to deliver the best quality work and help you excel in your business by focusing on your core business activities. Outsource data mining services to India and take the advantage of outsourcing and save cost.




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How Your Online Information is Stolen - The Art of Web Scraping and Data Harvesting

Web scraping, also known as web/internet harvesting involves the use of a computer program which is able to extract data from another program's display output. The main difference between standard parsing and web scraping is that in it, the output being scraped is meant for display to its human viewers instead of simply input to another program.

Therefore, it isn't generally document or structured for practical parsing. Generally web scraping will require that binary data be ignored - this usually means multimedia data or images - and then formatting the pieces that will confuse the desired goal - the text data. This means that in actually, optical character recognition software is a form of visual web scraper.

Usually a transfer of data occurring between two programs would utilize data structures designed to be processed automatically by computers, saving people from having to do this tedious job themselves. This usually involves formats and protocols with rigid structures that are therefore easy to parse, well documented, compact, and function to minimize duplication and ambiguity. In fact, they are so "computer-based" that they are generally not even readable by humans.

If human readability is desired, then the only automated way to accomplish this kind of a data transfer is by way of web scraping. At first, this was practiced in order to read the text data from the display screen of a computer. It was usually accomplished by reading the memory of the terminal via its auxiliary port, or through a connection between one computer's output port and another computer's input port.

It has therefore become a kind of way to parse the HTML text of web pages. The web scraping program is designed to process the text data that is of interest to the human reader, while identifying and removing any unwanted data, images, and formatting for the web design.

Though web scraping is often done for ethical reasons, it is frequently performed in order to swipe the data of "value" from another person or organization's website in order to apply it to someone else's - or to sabotage the original text altogether. Many efforts are now being put into place by webmasters in order to prevent this form of theft and vandalism.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Your-Online-Information-is-Stolen---The-Art-of-Web-Scraping-and-Data-Harvesting&id=923976

Digitize Data With Data Processing Services

Unorganized data might cost you your numero UNO position in your domain. If you have well-organized data, it will not only be helpful in decision-making but will also guarantee a smooth flow of your business. If you are stuck with heaps of documents to be converted into electronic format. Then, outsourcing your files to a company providing Large Volume Data Processing Services is the most accurate and efficient option.

Data processing is the process in which computer programs and other processing systems are used to analyze, summarize and convert the data into an electronic format.

It involves a series of process which are: -

    Validation - This process checks that whether the entries are correct or not.
    Sorting - In this process, sorting is done either sequentially or in various sets.
    Summarize data - This process summarizes the data into main points.
    Aggregation - Combination of different fragments of records takes place in this process.
    Analysis - This process involves the analysis, interpretation and presentation of the collected and organized data.

Data processing companies have comprehensive knowledge about all the above mentioned steps and will provide a complete package of Large volume data processing services which includes: -

    Manual data entry
    Forms based data capture
    Full text data capture
    Digitization
    Document conversion
    Word Processing
    e-Book conversion
    Data extraction from web
    OCR- Optical character recognition

By outsourcing, you can get rid of large volumes of data pretty quickly and can lay more stress on core business activities.

You will have access to many other benefits like: -

    Heaps of cluttered and unorganized work will be organized, sorted and digitized.
    You can make use of neatly organized data to make informed business decisions.
    Chances of losing data will be scarce once it is digitized.
    You can do away with unwanted data and get access to relevant data.
    You can cut down the operating costs and need not incur any expenses in setting up infrastructure.
    You can get the data converted into a form of your choice.

Companies that deal with Large volume data processing services have the experience, expertise, manpower and technology to deliver results as per your expectations. They can handle your bulk of data easily and process it in your desired format within the deadline.

If you want your large volume of data to be digitized with accuracy and at cost-effective rates, choose an outsourcing company which has years of experience in providing Large volume data processing services. You just need to spend a few hours browsing on the net and then short-listing the prospectives. Once you are done with going through the portfolio of these firms and are contented with their information, you can negotiate the rate with them and stipulate the time.

This article about large volume data Processing services has been authored by Sam Efron. He is an experienced technical content writer from data-entry-india.com. With several years of experience and expertise of writing about Data Processing Services, he brings a seasoned maturity and knowledge to his articles.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Digitize-Data-With-Data-Processing-Services&id=7963690

Data Discovery vs. Data Extraction

Looking at screen-scraping at a simplified level, there are two primary stages involved: data discovery and data extraction. Data discovery deals with navigating a web site to arrive at the pages containing the data you want, and data extraction deals with actually pulling that data off of those pages. Generally when people think of screen-scraping they focus on the data extraction portion of the process, but my experience has been that data discovery is often the more difficult of the two.

The data discovery step in screen-scraping might be as simple as requesting a single URL. For example, you might just need to go to the home page of a site and extract out the latest news headlines. On the other side of the spectrum, data discovery may involve logging in to a web site, traversing a series of pages in order to get needed cookies, submitting a POST request on a search form, traversing through search results pages, and finally following all of the "details" links within the search results pages to get to the data you're actually after. In cases of the former a simple Perl script would often work just fine. For anything much more complex than that, though, a commercial screen-scraping tool can be an incredible time-saver. Especially for sites that require logging in, writing code to handle screen-scraping can be a nightmare when it comes to dealing with cookies and such.

In the data extraction phase you've already arrived at the page containing the data you're interested in, and you now need to pull it out of the HTML. Traditionally this has typically involved creating a series of regular expressions that match the pieces of the page you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Regular expressions can be a bit complex to deal with, so most screen-scraping applications will hide these details from you, even though they may use regular expressions behind the scenes.

As an addendum, I should probably mention a third phase that is often ignored, and that is, what do you do with the data once you've extracted it? Common examples include writing the data to a CSV or XML file, or saving it to a database. In the case of a live web site you might even scrape the information and display it in the user's web browser in real-time. When shopping around for a screen-scraping tool you should make sure that it gives you the flexibility you need to work with the data once it's been extracted.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Discovery-vs.-Data-Extraction&id=165396

Data Mining Services

You will get all solutions regarding data mining from many companies in India. You can consult a variety of companies for data mining services and considering the variety is beneficial to customers. These companies also offer web research services which will help companies to perform critical business activities.

Very competitive prices for commodities will be the results where there is competition among qualified players in the data mining, data collection services and other computer-based services. Every company willing to cut down their costs regarding outsourcing data mining services and BPO data mining services will benefit from the companies offering data mining services in India. In addition, web research services are being sourced from the companies.

Outsourcing is a great way to reduce costs regarding labor, and companies in India will benefit from companies in India as well as from outside the country. The most famous aspect of outsourcing is data entry. Preference of outsourcing services from offshore countries has been a practice by companies to reduce costs, and therefore, it is not a wonder getting outsource data mining to India.

For companies which are seeking for outsourcing services such as outsource web data extraction, it is good to consider a variety of companies. The comparison will help them get best quality of service and businesses will grow rapidly in regard to the opportunities provided by the outsourcing companies. Outsourcing does not only provide opportunities for companies to reduce costs but to get labor where countries are experiencing shortage.

Outsourcing presents good and fast communication opportunity to companies. People will be communicating at the most convenient time they have to get the job done. The company is able to gather dedicated resources and team to accomplish their purpose. Outsourcing is a good way of getting a good job because the company will look for the best workforce. In addition, the competition for the outsourcing provides a rich ground to get the best providers.

In order to retain the job, providers will need to perform very well. The company will be getting high quality services even in regard to the price they are offering. In fact, it is possible to get people to work on your projects. Companies are able to get work done with the shortest time possible. For instance, where there is a lot of work to be done, companies may post the projects onto the websites and the projects will get people to work on them. The time factor comes in where the company will not have to wait if it wants the projects completed immediately.

Outsourcing has been effective in cutting labor costs because companies will not have to pay the extra amount required to retain employees such as the allowances relating to travels, as well as housing and health. These responsibilities are met by the companies that employ people on a permanent basis. The opportunity presented by the outsourcing of data and services is comfort among many other things because these jobs can be completed at home. This is the reason why the jobs will be preferred more in the future.

To increase business effectiveness, productivity and workflow, you need quality and accurate data entry system. this unrivaled quality is provided by Data extraction services which has excellent track record in providing quality services.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-Services&id=4733707

Why Outsource Data Entry Work to India? Here are the Reasons

India, the third largest English speaking nation in the world, is purportedly the hub for outsource service providers in Asia. With more and more people investing billions of dollars into websites and other online advertising campaigns, India stands as a united front to answering the demands of various business clients and industries that span the entire globe.

Search engine optimization companies, especially those involved with database or website management projects from outsource clients would agree, that data entry is one of the more basic, yet more complicated procedures in the early stages of directory development. The procedure for data entry work is fairly systematic. The primary data entry level task is to gather a list of data from specific industries or categories. For example, hotels can be classified under one category, or business industry.

The main task of the data entry personnel is to identify possible records which could help in supplementing the base data on the hotel or hotel chains being discussed in the directory. Common items like hotel locations, hotel management contact details, reservation information and dining services are the most fundamental facts which need to be entered for a particular hotel index on the directory.

It is not a coincidence that India should be one of the more deserving nations who could easily acquire data entry jobs from outsource clients, as the whole country itself is rapidly mobilizing its technological prowess to facilitate the outburst of outsource service demands from around the world. In a sense, India is qualified to brag that it can certainly do the job. In terms of technology and experience on the "Web Business", India has greater lead than the rest of the Asian countries.

Even the Philippines, which ranks as the fourth largest English speaking nation in Asia, is curbed to follow a very far distance, already paced by India.

It's no wonder then, that outsourcing data entry level work in India could be an excellent choice for most businessmen or web investors. Nothing really beats the quality and reliability honed by years of dealing with optimization and outsourcing services, which India has been exposed to.

India nonetheless remains as the dominating force in Asia when it comes to outsource services with its proven track record.

In totality, Outsourcing data entry work in India is a decision that should be made with quality in mind. Nothing beats India when it comes to this, as they are bantering on a more acknowledged field, to which they have been first made privy, and have done reasonably well to maintain. To get the best deals for Outsource service with Data Entry work, do not forget to level out with India on this aspect.

India stands to gain on the following services which are commonly outsourced by major clients from both U.S. and Europe: PHP Programmers, Bulk Linkers, Data Entry work, Content development, Web Design and Web Development services and many others.




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Data Extraction - A Guideline to Use Scrapping Tools Effectively

So many people around the world do not have much knowledge about these scrapping tools. In their views, mining means extracting resources from the earth. In these internet technology days, the new mined resource is data. There are so many data mining software tools are available in the internet to extract specific data from the web. Every company in the world has been dealing with tons of data, managing and converting this data into a useful form is a real hectic work for them. If this right information is not available at the right time a company will lose valuable time to making strategic decisions on this accurate information.

This type of situation will break opportunities in the present competitive market. However, in these situations, the data extraction and data mining tools will help you to take the strategic decisions in right time to reach your goals in this competitive business. There are so many advantages with these tools that you can store customer information in a sequential manner, you can know the operations of your competitors, and also you can figure out your company performance. And it is a critical job to every company to have this information at fingertips when they need this information.

To survive in this competitive business world, this data extraction and data mining are critical in operations of the company. There is a powerful tool called Website scraper used in online digital mining. With this toll, you can filter the data in internet and retrieves the information for specific needs. This scrapping tool is used in various fields and types are numerous. Research, surveillance, and the harvesting of direct marketing leads is just a few ways the website scraper assists professionals in the workplace.

Screen scrapping tool is another tool which useful to extract the data from the web. This is much helpful when you work on the internet to mine data to your local hard disks. It provides a graphical interface allowing you to designate Universal Resource Locator, data elements to be extracted, and scripting logic to traverse pages and work with mined data. You can use this tool as periodical intervals. By using this tool, you can download the database in internet to you spread sheets. The important one in scrapping tools is Data mining software, it will extract the large amount of information from the web, and it will compare that date into a useful format. This tool is used in various sectors of business, especially, for those who are creating leads, budget establishing seeing the competitors charges and analysis the trends in online. With this tool, the information is gathered and immediately uses for your business needs.

Another best scrapping tool is e mailing scrapping tool, this tool crawls the public email addresses from various web sites. You can easily from a large mailing list with this tool. You can use these mailing lists to promote your product through online and proposals sending an offer for related business and many more to do. With this toll, you can find the targeted customers towards your product or potential business parents. This will allows you to expand your business in the online market.

There are so many well established and esteemed organizations are providing these features free of cost as the trial offer to customers. If you want permanent services, you need to pay nominal fees. You can download these services from their valuable web sites also.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Extraction---A-Guideline-to-Use-Scrapping-Tools-Effectively&id=3600918

Data Mining Process - Why Outsource Data Mining Service?

Overview of Data Mining and Process:
Data mining is one of the unique techniques for investigating information to extract certain data patterns and decide to outcome of existing requirements. Data mining is widely use in client research, services analysis, market research and so on. It is totally based on mathematical algorithm and analytical skills to drive the desired results from the huge database collection.

Information mining is mostly used by financial analyzer, business and professional organization and also there are many growing area of business that are get maximum advantages of data extract with use of data warehouses in their small to large level of businesses.

Most of functionalities which are used in information collecting process define as under:

* Retrieving Data

* Analyzing Data

* Extracting Data

* Transforming Data

* Loading Data

* Managing Databases

Most of small, medium and large levels of businesses are collect huge amount of data or information for analysis and research to develop business. Such kind of large amount will help and makes it much important whenever information or data required.

Why Outsource Data Online Mining Service?

Outsourcing advantages of data mining services:
o Almost save 60% operating cost
o High quality analysis processes ensuring accuracy levels of almost 99.98%
o Guaranteed risk free outsourcing experience ensured by inflexible information security policies and practices
o Get your project done within a quick turnaround time
o You can measure highly skilled and expertise by taking benefits of Free Trial Program.
o Get the gathered information presented in a simple and easy to access format

Thus, data or information mining is very important part of the web research services and it is most useful process. By outsource data extraction and mining service; you can concentrate on your co relative business and growing fast as you desire.

Outsourcing web research is trusted and well known Internet Market research organization having years of experience in BPO (business process outsourcing) field.

If you want to more information about data mining services and related web research services, then contact us.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-Process---Why-Outsource-Data-Mining-Service?&id=3789102

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Data scrape is the process of extracting data from web by using software program from proven website only. Extracted data any one can use for any purposes as per the desires in various industries as the web having every important data of the world. We provide best of the web data extracting software. We have the expertise and one of kind knowledge in web data extraction, image scrapping, screen scrapping, email extract services, data mining, web grabbing.

Who can use Data Scraping Services?

Data scraping and extraction services can be used by any organization, company, or any firm who would like to have a data from particular industry, data of targeted customer, particular company, or anything which is available on net like data of email id, website name, search term or anything which is available on web. Most of time a marketing company like to use data scraping and data extraction services to do marketing for a particular product in certain industry and to reach the targeted customer for example if X company like to contact a restaurant of California city, so our software can extract the data of restaurant of California city and a marketing company can use this data to market their restaurant kind of product. MLM and Network marketing company also use data extraction and data scrapping services to to find a new customer by extracting data of certain prospective customer and can contact customer by telephone, sending a postcard, email marketing, and this way they build their huge network and build large group for their own product and company.

We helped many companies to find particular data as per their need for example.

Web Data Extraction

Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. Because of this, tool kits that scrape web content were created. A web scraper is an API to extract data from a web site. We help you to create a kind of API which helps you to scrape data as per your need. We provide quality and affordable web Data Extraction application

Data Collection

Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using info structures suited for automated processing by computers, not people. Such interchange formats and protocols are typically rigidly structured, well-documented, easily parsed, and keep ambiguity to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human-readable at all. That's why the key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user.

Email Extractor

A tool which helps you to extract the email ids from any reliable sources automatically that is called a email extractor. It basically services the function of collecting business contacts from various web pages, HTML files, text files or any other format without duplicates email ids.

Screen scrapping

Screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text information from a computer display terminal's screen and collecting visual data from a source, instead of parsing data as in web scraping.

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services is the process of extracting patterns from information. Datamining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform the data into information. Any format including MS excels, CSV, HTML and many such formats according to your requirements.

Web spider

A Web spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Web Grabber

Web grabber is just a other name of the data scraping or data extraction.

Web Bot

Web Bot is software program that is claimed to be able to predict future events by tracking keywords entered on the Internet. Web bot software is the best program to pull out articles, blog, relevant website content and many such website related data We have worked with many clients for data extracting, data scrapping and data mining they are really happy with our services we provide very quality services and make your work data work very easy and automatic.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Web-Data-Extraction-Services-Will-Save-Your-Time-and-Money-by-Automatic-Data-Collection&id=5159023

Data Mining vs Screen-Scraping

Data mining isn't screen-scraping. I know that some people in the room may disagree with that statement, but they're actually two almost completely different concepts.

In a nutshell, you might state it this way: screen-scraping allows you to get information, where data mining allows you to analyze information. That's a pretty big simplification, so I'll elaborate a bit.

The term "screen-scraping" comes from the old mainframe terminal days where people worked on computers with green and black screens containing only text. Screen-scraping was used to extract characters from the screens so that they could be analyzed. Fast-forwarding to the web world of today, screen-scraping now most commonly refers to extracting information from web sites. That is, computer programs can "crawl" or "spider" through web sites, pulling out data. People often do this to build things like comparison shopping engines, archive web pages, or simply download text to a spreadsheet so that it can be filtered and analyzed.

Data mining, on the other hand, is defined by Wikipedia as the "practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns." In other words, you already have the data, and you're now analyzing it to learn useful things about it. Data mining often involves lots of complex algorithms based on statistical methods. It has nothing to do with how you got the data in the first place. In data mining you only care about analyzing what's already there.

The difficulty is that people who don't know the term "screen-scraping" will try Googling for anything that resembles it. We include a number of these terms on our web site to help such folks; for example, we created pages entitled Text Data Mining, Automated Data Collection, Web Site Data Extraction, and even Web Site Ripper (I suppose "scraping" is sort of like "ripping"). So it presents a bit of a problem-we don't necessarily want to perpetuate a misconception (i.e., screen-scraping = data mining), but we also have to use terminology that people will actually use.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-vs-Screen-Scraping&id=146813

Advantages of Online Data Entry Services

People all over the world are enthusiastic to buy online data entry services as they find it cost effective. Most of them have an impression that they get quality services against the prices they have to pay. Entering data online is of a great help to business units of all sizes as they consider them as their main basis of profession.

Online data entering and typing services providers have skilled resources at their service who deliver quality work timely. These service providers have modernized technology, assuring cent percent security of data. Online data entry services include the following:

    Data entry
    Data Processing
    Product entry
    Data typing
    Data mining, Data capture/collection
    Business Process Outsourcing
    Data Conversion
    Form Filling
    Web and mortgage research
    Extraction services
    Online copying, pasting, editing, sorting, as well as indexing data
    E-books and e-magazines data entry

Get companies world wide quality services to business units of all sizes, some of the common input formats are:

    PDF
    TIFF
    GIF
    XBM
    JPG
    PNG
    BMP
    TGA
    XML
    HTML
    SGML
    Printed documents
    Hard copies, etc

Benefits of outsourcing online data entering services:

Major benefits of data entry for business units is that they get the facts and figures which helps in taking strategic decisions for the organization. The data projected by numbers turns to be a factor of evaluation that accelerates the progress of the business. Online data typing services maintain high level of security by using systems that are highly protected.

The business organization progresses because of right decisions taken with the help of superior quality data available.

    Save operational overhead expense.
    Saves time and space.
    Accurate services can be accessed.
    Eliminating the paper documents.
    Cost effective.
    Data accessible from anywhere in the world.
    100% work satisfaction.
    Access to professional and experienced data typing services.
    Adequate knowledge of wide range industrial needs.
    Use of highly advance technologies for quality results.

Business organizations find themselves blessed because of the benefits they receive out of outsourcing their projects on online data entering and typing services, because it not only saves their time but also saves a huge amount of money.

Upcoming business companies can focus on their key business functions instead of dealing with non-key business activities. They find it sensible to outsource their confidential and crucial projects to trustworthy online data entry services and remain free for their key business activities. These companies have several layers of quality control which assures 99.9% quality on projects on online data entry.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Advantages-of-Online-Data-Entry-Services&id=6526483

Healthcare Marketing Series - Data Mining - The 21st Century Marketing Gold Rush

There is gold in them there hills! Well there is gold right within a few blocks of your office. Mining for patients, not unlike mining for gold or drilling for oil requires either great luck or great research.

It's all about the odds.

It's true that like old Jed from the Beverly Hillbillies, you might just take a shot and strike oil. But more likely you might drill a dry hole or dig a mine and find dirt not diamonds. Without research you might be a mere 2 feet from pay dirt, but drilling or mining in just the wrong spot.

Now oil companies and gold mining companies spend millions, if not, billions of dollars studying where and how to effectively find the "mother load". If market research is good enough for the big boys, it should be good enough for the healthcare provider. Remember as a health care professional you probably don't have the extras millions laying around to squander on trial and error marketing.

If you did there would be little need for you to market to find new patients to help.

In previous articles in the Health Care Marketing Series we talked about developing a marketing strategy, using metrics to measure the performance of your marketing execution, developing effective marketing warheads based on your marketing strategy, evaluating the most efficient ways to deliver those warheads, your marketing missile systems, and tying several marketing methods together into a marketing MIRV.

If you have been following along with our articles and starting to integrate the concepts detailed in them, by now you should have an excellent marketing infrastructure. Ready to launch laser guided marketing missiles tipped with nuclear marketing MIRVs. The better you have done your research, the more detailed your marketing strategy, the more effective and efficient your delivery systems, the bigger bang you'll receive from your marketing campaign. And ultimately the more lives you will help to change of patients that truly can benefit from your skills and talents as a doctor.

Sounds like you're ready for healthcare marketing shock and awe.

Everything is ready to launch, this is great, press the button and fire away!

Ah, but wait just a minute, General. What is the target? Where are they? What are the aiming coordinates?

The target? Why of course all those sick people out there.

Where are they? Well of course, out there!

The coordinates? Man just press the button, carpet bomb man. Carpet bomb!

This scenario is designed to show you how quickly the wheels can come off even the best intended marketing war machine. It brings us back full circle. We are right back to our original article on marketing strategy.

But this time we are going to introduce the concept of data mining. If you remember, our article on marketing strategy talked about doing research. We talked about research as the true cornerstone of all marketing efforts.

What is the target, General?

Answering this question is a little difficult and the truth is each healthcare provider needs to determine his or her high value target. And more importantly needs to know how to determine his or her high value targets.

Let's go back to our launch scenario to illustrate this point. Let's continue with our military analogy. Let's say we have several aircraft carriers, a few destroyers and a fleet of rowboats, making up our marketing battlefield.

As we have discussed previously, waging a marketing war, like any war, consumes resources. So do we want to launch our nuclear marketing MIRVs, the most valuable resources in our arsenal, and target the fleet of rowboats?

Or would it be wiser to target those aircraft carriers?

Well the obvious answer is "get those carriers".

But here is where things get a little tricky. One man's aircraft carrier is another man's rowboat.

You have to data mine your practice to determine which targets are high value targets.

What goes into that data mining process? Well first and foremost, what conditions do you 1.like to treat, 2. have a proven track record of treating and 3. obtain a reasonable reimbursement for treating.

In my own practice, I typically do not like or enjoy treating shoulder problems. I don't know if I don't like treating shoulders because I haven't had great results with them or if I haven't had great results, because I don't like treating them. Needless to say my reimbursement for treating shoulder cases is relatively low.

So do I really want to carpet bomb my marketing terrain and come up with 10 new cases of rotator cuff tears? These cases, for more than one reason, are my rowboats.

On the contrary, I like to treat neurological conditions like chronic pain; Neuropathy patients, Spinal Stenosis patients, Tinnitus patients, patients with Parkinson's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis patients. I've had results with these types of cases that have been good enough to publish. Because they are complex and difficult cases, I obtain a better than average reimbursement for my efforts. These cases are my aircraft carriers. If my marketing campaign brings me ten cases with these types of problems, chances are that the patient will obtain some great relief, I will find working with them an intellectual and stimulating challenge and my marketing efforts will bring me a handsome return on investment.

So the first lesson of data mining is to identify your aircraft carriers. They must be "your" aircraft carriers. You must have a good personal track record of helping these types of patients. You should enjoy treating these types of cases. And you should be rewarded for your time and expertise.

That's the first step in the process. Identifying your high value targets. The next step is THE most important aspect of healthcare marketing. As I discussed above, I enjoy working with complex neurological cases. But how many of these types of patients exist in my marketing terrain and are they looking for the type of help I can offer?

Being able to accurately answer these important questions is the single most valuable information I can extract using data mining.

It doesn't matter if I like treating these cases. It doesn't matter if I make a good living treating these cases. It doesn't matter if my success in treating these cases has made the local news. What matters is 1. do these types of cases exist in my neighborhood and 2. are they looking for the help I can provide to them?

You absolutely positively need to know who is looking for what in your marketing terrain and if what people are clamoring for is what you have to offer.

This knowledge is the most powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. It's your secret weapon. It is the foundation of your marketing strategy. It is so important that you should consider moving your office if the results of your data mining don't reveal an ocean full of aircraft carriers in your marketing terrain for you to target.

If your market research does not reveal an abundance of aircraft carriers on your horizon, you need to either 1. move to a new battlefield, 2. re-target your efforts towards the destroyers in your market or 3. try to create a market.

Let's look at your last choice. Trying to create a market. Unless you are Coke or Pepsi, your ability to create a market as a health care provider is extremely limited. To continue on with our analogy, to create a market requires converting rowboats into, at least, destroyers, but better yet aircraft carriers.

What would it cost if you took a rowboat to a ship yard and told them to rebuild it as an aircraft carrier?

This is what you face if you try to create a market where none exists. Unless you have a personality flaw and thrive on selling ice to Eskimos, creating a market is not a rewarding proposition.

So scratch this option off the table right now.

What about re-targeting your campaign towards destroyers? That's a viable option. It's a good option. It's probably your best option. It's an option that will likely give you your best return on investment. It is recommended that you focus your arsenal on the destroyers while at the same time never passing on an opportunity to sink an aircraft carrier.

So what is the secret? How do you data mine for aircraft carriers?

Well its quite simple in the internet age. Just use the services of a market research firm. I like http://www.marketresearch.com They will do the data mining for you.

They can provide market intelligence that will tell you not only what the health care aircraft carriers are, but also where they are.

With this information, you will have a competitive advantage in your marketing battlefield. You can segment, and target high value targets in your area while your competitors squander their marketing resources on rowboats. Or even worse carpet bomb and hit ocean water, not valuable targets.

Your marketing strategy should be highly targeted. Your marketing resources should be well spent. As we discussed in our very first article on true "Marketing Strategy" you should enter the battle against your competition already knowing your have won.

What gives you this dominant position in the market, is knowing ahead-of-time, who is looking for what in your marketing terrain. In other words, not trying to create a market, but rather identifying existing market niches, specifically targeting them with laser guided precision and having headlines and ad copy based on your strength versus the weakness of your competition within that niche.

This research-based marketing strategy is sure to cause a big bang with potential patients.

And leave your competition trying to sell ice to Eskimos.

I hope you see how important market research is and why it is a good thing to spend some of your marketing budget on research before you waste your marketing resources on poorly targeted low value or no-value targets. This article was intended to give you a glimpse at how to use data mining and consumer demographics information as a foundation for the development of a scientific research-based marketing strategy. This article shows you how to use existing resources to give your marketing efforts (and you) a competitive advantage.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Healthcare-Marketing-Series---Data-Mining---The--21st-Century-Marketing-Gold-Rush&id=1486283

Usefulness of Web Scraping Services

For any business or organization, surveys and market research play important roles in the strategic decision-making process. Data extraction and web scraping techniques are important tools that find relevant data and information for your personal or business use. Many companies employ people to copy-paste data manually from the web pages. This process is very reliable but very costly as it results to time wastage and effort. This is so because the data collected is less compared to the resources spent and time taken to gather such data.

Nowadays, various data mining companies have developed effective web scraping techniques that can crawl over thousands of websites and their pages to harvest particular information. The information extracted is then stored into a CSV file, database, XML file, or any other source with the required format. After the data has been collected and stored, data mining process can be used to extract the hidden patterns and trends contained in the data. By understanding the correlations and patterns in the data; policies can be formulated and thereby aiding the decision-making process. The information can also be stored for future reference.

The following are some of the common examples of data extraction process:

• Scrap through a government portal in order to extract the names of the citizens who are reliable for a given survey.
• Scraping competitor websites for feature data and product pricing
• Using web scraping to download videos and images for stock photography site or for website design

Automated Data Collection
It is important to note that web scraping process allows a company to monitor the website data changes over a given time frame. It also collects the data on a routine basis regularly. Automated data collection techniques are quite important as they help companies to discover customer trends and market trends. By determining market trends, it is possible to understand the customer behavior and predict the likelihood of how the data will change.

The following are some of the examples of the automated data collection:

• Monitoring price information for the particular stocks on hourly basis
• Collecting mortgage rates from the various financial institutions on the daily basis
• Checking on weather reports on regular basis as required

By using web scraping services it is possible to extract any data that is related to your business. The data can then be downloaded into a spreadsheet or a database for it to be analyzed and compared. Storing the data in a database or in a required format makes it easier for interpretation and understanding of the correlations and for identification of the hidden patterns.

Through web scraping it is possible to get quicker and accurate results and thus saving many resources in terms of money and time. With data extraction services, it is possible to fetch information about pricing, mailing, database, profile data, and competitors data on a consistent basis. With the emergence of professional data mining companies outsourcing your services will greatly reduce your costs and at the same time you are assured of high quality services.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Usefulness-of-Web-Scraping-Services&id=7181014

Collecting Data With Web Scrapers

There is a large amount of data available only through websites. However, as many people have found out, trying to copy data into a usable database or spreadsheet directly out of a website can be a tiring process. Data entry from internet sources can quickly become cost prohibitive as the required hours add up. Clearly, an automated method for collating information from HTML-based sites can offer huge management cost savings.

Web scrapers are programs that are able to aggregate information from the internet. They are capable of navigating the web, assessing the contents of a site, and then pulling data points and placing them into a structured, working database or spreadsheet. Many companies and services will use programs to web scrape, such as comparing prices, performing online research, or tracking changes to online content.

Let's take a look at how web scrapers can aid data collection and management for a variety of purposes.

Improving On Manual Entry Methods

Using a computer's copy and paste function or simply typing text from a site is extremely inefficient and costly. Web scrapers are able to navigate through a series of websites, make decisions on what is important data, and then copy the info into a structured database, spreadsheet, or other program. Software packages include the ability to record macros by having a user perform a routine once and then have the computer remember and automate those actions. Every user can effectively act as their own programmer to expand the capabilities to process websites. These applications can also interface with databases in order to automatically manage information as it is pulled from a website.

Aggregating Information

There are a number of instances where material stored in websites can be manipulated and stored. For example, a clothing company that is looking to bring their line of apparel to retailers can go online for the contact information of retailers in their area and then present that information to sales personnel to generate leads. Many businesses can perform market research on prices and product availability by analyzing online catalogues.

Data Management

Managing figures and numbers is best done through spreadsheets and databases; however, information on a website formatted with HTML is not readily accessible for such purposes. While websites are excellent for displaying facts and figures, they fall short when they need to be analyzed, sorted, or otherwise manipulated. Ultimately, web scrapers are able to take the output that is intended for display to a person and change it to numbers that can be used by a computer. Furthermore, by automating this process with software applications and macros, entry costs are severely reduced.

This type of data management is also effective at merging different information sources. If a company were to purchase research or statistical information, it could be scraped in order to format the information into a database. This is also highly effective at taking a legacy system's contents and incorporating them into today's systems.





Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Collecting-Data-With-Web-Scrapers&id=4223877