Introduction:
Undoubtedly, web scraping has gained wide popularity and acceptance these days. Nevertheless, you can make a nice career and earn well as a full-time or freelance web scraper. The web contains all the information irrespective of the industry, making Web Scraping quite essential. This information provides actionable insights for businesses to modify one’s business strategies and beat their competitors. So, if you are interested in web scraping and looking forward to turning this interest into a money-making opportunity, you must acquire a good experience of it through web scraping projects.
You can attune your workflow if you know the right data for your decision-making exercises around real-world problems. Regardless of whether you choose a large-scale web scraping project or a small scale, it can add great value to your web scraping knowledge and skill set.
Leading search engines like Google depend on large-scale web scraping. Smaller web scraping tasks can be used to solve small-level problems as well. There are several amazing large-scale and small-scale web scraping projects to take on. Web scraping use cases and applications can range from market research for strategy business projects to scraping for training ML models.
With the fast-paced development of anti-bot solutions and measures taken by websites and anti-bot providers, the game of web scraping is also advancing. And here we are with 10 hand-picked web scraping project ideas for 2022 to help you polish your web scraper development skill.
Customer Review Analysis
Objective: To serve their customers better, businesses need to be aware of their feedback. By collecting and analyzing the customers’ reviews, businesses can know about insightful trends of customers and fine-tune their products and services accordingly.
Project Idea: In this project, pick a product available on any popular e-commerce website and scrape data for that product. You have to scrape and analyze the customer feedback and use this scraped data to analyze the customers’ sentiment. Further, you can do the required statistical analysis to draw insightful inferences.
You can go for Beautiful Soup, a Python open-source library for this project. It enables you to crawl the targeted e-commerce website and extract the review from that website with the help of HTML tags.
Flight Tickets Price Analysis
Objective: Given that high flight ticket costs are not something we can ignore while planning our vacation budget, who wouldn’t want to spend the minimum on flight tickets? But of course, it is not always possible for us to make a booking when the prices are low. Occasionally, there are steep decrements in airplane ticket prices at odd timings. If you could analyze and understand them, you can grab a better chance of booking the tickets near your travel date at humble prices.
Project Idea: For this web scraping project, first, pick a website serving traveling or flight booking facilities, such as Tripadvisor or Skyscanner. Feed-in your details using an automated fashion, and then you can crawl the website to fetch the ticket price details.
You can suitably use Python’s Selenium for performing web scraping in this project. You can send yourself an email from the website with the information extracted. For this purpose, you may use Python’s smtplib package.
Search Engine Rank Tracking System
Objective: A Search Engine Rank Tracking System helps monitor search engines’ ranking criteria. For instance, if you want to know how your web page will be ranked on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), analyze which rank your page is most likely to land on. Based on the conclusions drawn, you can implement SEO techniques to improve your page ranking.
Project Idea: A scraper will take a list of target keywords, fetch the search engine results, and return the top-ranking page for the domain you want to track based on search engine results. You can easily build this scraping system with the help of Python.
But if the search engine you choose to monitor ranking, you might quickly get blocked temporarily. Why? Because Google is ‘Google,’ it doesn’t like to be scraped and has smart anti-bots to block such scrapers. However, you can put a cron job or an Airflow data pipeline in use if you want to collect and report on a small number of keywords in less time.
Lead Generation from Online Forums
Objective: Several web pages on the Internet forums intend to make users enter their contact info like email addresses. You can extract these mail addresses to send promotional emails, advertisements, etc., for your product and services. This involves crawling web pages.
Project Idea: This area of web scraping that involves extracting emails and phone numbers from web pages online for the purpose of marketing has gotten ahead over the years. This is rather a web crawling-oriented project. Hence, you might need to shift a little mind from web scraping to web crawling. You pass over and add to the queue numerous pages that you discover as the script discovers them. Check out this blog to get a clearer insight into the concepts of web scraping and web crawling.
This marketing strategy might sound like a cliche, but it can be quite beneficial in reality. The targeted lead may end up giving a positive response to the marketing messages sent. If done in the right way, this process could be way smoother so that the audience won’t even find it spammy. For parsing out emails from texts in this project, you ought to have a good knowledge of regular expressions. Some users are good at disguising their emails to be undetectable to web scrapers. Thus, if you want your script to be highly effective, you must visit some pages to be able to capture undetectable emails.
Bot for E-Trading
Objective: Owing to the fluctuating prices of cryptocurrency and shares, e-trading has been a major concern for investors. It has been a trending topic among the biggest economists like Elon Musk, Raghu Ram Ranjan, and others. If you can create a bot using web scraping that can help you predict the prices of cryptocurrencies or stocks, it can be of great benefit.
Project Idea: In this project, you would need a website that serves you with all the relevant information on stocks, shares, or cryptocurrency. One such helpful website, for instance, is CoinMarketCap, which hosts all the related information on cryptocurrencies such as NFTs, their trend record over the last seven days, and so on.
For implementing this web scraping project, you can use Python’s BeautifulSoup.
Political Text Analysis
Objective: Social Media platforms are not just a means of connecting with people anymore. Over time, they have played an essential role in setting notions for various political parties, for citizens to voice their opinions regarding different political parties, spread awareness, etc. It’s rather become a medium to voice their opinions. Digital movements like #StopFundingHate, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, etc., have been recognised and discussed globally. Political parties have realized the social media influence, thereby analyzing the sentiments of the citizens.
Project Idea: For this type of web scraping project, pick a social media platform like Twitter, Facebook, etc., as per your wish first. Then, choose a specific political party you want to scrape data for. Hereafter, scrape the public posts and political texts with certain hashtags on the chosen social media platform to analyze the generic sentiments of a country’s citizens regarding that party.
To implement this project, you can use the R programming language. In R, the Facebook package is helpful in scraping data from Facebook’s API. Otherwise, you can use Python as well for this project.
ML Algorithm Training Data Collection
Objective: Machine learning models or algorithms require a large volume of data as a training dataset for improving the accuracy and precision of the results. But, the real problem is – How and from where will you get such large amounts of data? Web scraping is the answer. Data scientists can use the web scraped data for training their ML models. The web has unlimited data, and if you can fetch the desired data to be treated as an ML algorithm training dataset, it can’t be more useful.
Project Idea: This project again entails web crawling. You can traverse through different web pages and extract relevant data after adding it to the queue as your script discovers a number of web pages through links. You can use Python again to work on this web scraping project.
Scraping a Job Portal
Objective: This is another common and interesting web scraping project idea. There are various online job portals like Indeed, Monster.com, etc. You can use your web scraping expertise to find the most common criteria for a particular job or position. You can alternatively pick multiple job portals for this project, too. Though, it will increase the difficulty level of your project.
Project Idea: In this project, you will build a tool that scrapes one or more job portals and checks the requirements of the desired job position. For example, you can look at all the ‘Graphic Designers’ jobs present in the job portal. You can work on the scraped data to analyze the most popular criteria for hiring a Graphic Designer professional.
Fetching Product Data
Objective: One of the many important aspects of e-commerce businesses is preparing thousands of product images, descriptions, and features that have already been written for the same product by different online suppliers. Web scraping can automate the entire process of accessing such real-time data at scale regarding a product in very little time and empower one’s product intelligence.
Project Idea: For this web scraping project, you will develop a product list script that will scrape the web to extract all the product data across different domains. Applying the correct AI algorithm for creating this scraper can make data extraction from dynamic pages convenient. You can use Python Beautiful Soup for designing this web scraper.
News Aggregation System
Objective: Media being the fourth pillar of our constitution, it is no wonder that there are so many different news channels today. And, with so much going on all around this world, it becomes challenging to keep track of all kinds of relevant news on different topics. Developing a News Aggregation through web scraping can effectively solve this problem.
Project Idea: This project is a collaborative web scraping and ML NLP solution. Here in this project, you will need to build a customized one-stop solution for news from worldwide that is relevant to you. You may choose the websites of your taste and scrape data from them to gather news. Furthermore, you will have to use a text summarizer designed using machine learning NLP to submit relevant news. It is suggestible to use the Web Content Extractor for this project as it is an easy-to-use web scraping tool with a 14-days free trial.
Conclusion
Hope this list of project ideas will help you unlock your creativity and work on refining your web scraping skills. There are many mind-blowing web scraping projects to try your hands-on, and you just need that rigor to come up with innovative project ideas on your own. The above-enlisted project ideas will help you take your web scraping to a different level. Keep learning with Great Learning!