Web Scraping Explained: How Companies Gather Data Across the Internet
In today’s digital landscape, the ways companies collect, analyze, and utilize data have become increasingly sophisticated. One such method that powers many services we use daily is web scraping – a technique that’s often invisible to the average user but essential to many online businesses.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is essentially the automated collection of data from websites. Neil Amy, founder and CEO of RailByte, explains it clearly: “When you’re going to buy a flight, a hotel, or a car, most people go to sites like Google Flights, Skyscanner, or Booking.com. These sites are essentially search engines that offer consumers the cheapest prices and various filters and functions.”
These aggregator sites don’t maintain their own databases of flights or hotels. Instead, they use web scraping to collect information from individual airline sites, hotel chains, and other providers. The software automatically visits these websites, extracts the relevant data, brings it back to a central database, and then displays it to consumers in a unified interface.
The Scale of Data Collection
The scale of web scraping operations can be massive. According to Amy, one of RailByte’s largest customers performs approximately 10 billion requests per month on a single e-commerce site. They collect data on every product, SKU, color, and review to build comprehensive databases that can then be analyzed for insights.
The Technical Infrastructure Behind Web Scraping
Web scraping requires specialized infrastructure, particularly regarding IP addresses. When a website detects an unusually high number of requests from a single IP address, it might block that address as a potential security threat.
This is where proxy services come in. Similar to VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) that consumers might use for privacy, proxies allow companies to route their scraping requests through different IP addresses. This prevents blocking and creates the impression that the requests are coming from many different users rather than a single automated system.
The Ethics and Legality of Data Collection
The industry operates in a complex space regarding privacy and data access. Amy notes an interesting dynamic: “The same companies who are blocking these efforts are the same companies that come and work with us and say, ‘I want to go scrape our competitors because they’re doing it to us.'”
For consumers concerned about privacy, Amy recommends setting social media privacy settings to limit content sharing only to friends rather than publishing it publicly. Information behind login walls is generally protected, and reputable data collection companies don’t scrape such content.
The Impact of AI on Data Collection
The rise of artificial intelligence is likely to intensify data collection practices. As Amy puts it, “The introduction of AI is only going to make it worse because AI needs as much data as possible to make sense of more and more data.”
This increasing hunger for data presents both opportunities and challenges for businesses and consumers alike. Companies like RailByte are positioned at the intersection of these trends, providing the infrastructure that enables large-scale data collection while navigating the associated ethical considerations.
Beyond Profit: A Business Philosophy
Despite opportunities to sell his company, Amy has chosen to continue building RailByte with a philosophy that goes beyond mere profit. Inspired by the concept of conscious capitalism, he believes businesses should serve multiple stakeholders: customers, employees, vendors, communities, and the environment – not just shareholders.
This approach has manifested in concrete actions, such as supporting Ukrainian team members during the war by providing financial assistance, arranging accommodations, and organizing safe transportation out of conflict zones.
The Future of Data Collection
As AI continues to develop and companies seek ever more data to train their models, the web scraping industry is likely to grow in both size and sophistication. For businesses, the challenge will be balancing the need for data with ethical considerations and regulatory compliance. For consumers, understanding how data is collected and used becomes increasingly important in managing digital privacy.
Whether we’re comparing flight prices, shopping for the best deals, or researching products, web scraping is working behind the scenes to aggregate information from across the internet. It’s a technology that, while largely invisible, has become essential to the online experience of billions of users worldwide.