Are you learning how to develop web scrapers and you are looking for a project idea to implement in web scraping? Search no more. On this page, we would be providing you with 10 solid useful web scraping project ideas you can implement.
Do you know that web scraping at this point can be a career and what you can earn a living from? If you doubt me, take a look at how much full-time web scrapers earn or their counterparts on freelance websites like Upwork.
If you have been learning how to develop web scrapers or you are a computer science student that has taken interest in the field and wants your project to be on web scraping, then you are on the right page. There are tonnes of project ideas that require web scraping to be implemented many of which are not dummy projects that would just collect data for collecting sake.
Some of these problems solve real-world problems, could make you money, and fine-tune your workflow especially if you know the right data to use for your decision-making exercises. Web scraping projects can be as big or small as you want them.
Google and other popular search engines depend on web scraping which could be seen as web scraping on a large scale. There are smaller web scraping tasks that could also be used to solve problems.
Let take a look at some of the web scraping project ideas you could implement.
1. Customers Review Analysis
Consumers are increasingly becoming vocal online about the products they use whether being given to them for free or they paid for them. This means that you can tell what users of a certain product think about the product before even using the product. Virtually all full-fledged e-commerce platforms allow buyers to drop reviews and ratings for the products they buy.
For these e-commerce platforms, these reviews are from confirmed buyers as in the case of Amazon and AliExpress, among others. However, with thousands and millions of reviews on a product, you cannot keep a tab on what each review is saying, you will need a method to classify these reviews and that is where web scraping and text classification/ analysis comes in.
What this project entails is that you scrape the review of users of a project on Amazon and try to find out what they feel about the product. Web scraping is just one aspect of the project. After the reviews have been collected, you will need to carry out an analysis to determine what the customers are saying. Do they like the product? Do they have any common complaints?
Do they have a suggestion or improvement idea for the product, or they just felt buying is a complete waste of their money? All of these can be discovered from reviews scraped. You will need to carry out sentimental analysis and other statistical analyses to be able to get your answers. The project is also relevant for those learning Natural Language Processing (NLP) and marketers looking to get insight from their customers’ reviews.
2. Search Engine Rank Monitoring System
This is one project I am particularly excited about as I have developed it in the past while trying to cut costs. Now a little story about how this project came about. At that time, I own a blog I was doing SEO for and almost all of the good SEO tools for checking how web pages rank on the Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are paid tools. I needed to know how many pages were ranking daily for the keywords I am doing SEO for.
In a bid to avoid spending money on the paid tools, I remember I got a coding skill and quickly learned web scraping. Using that, I was able to build a simple rank checker that monitors my biog ranking for the keywords I wanted to rank for daily.
That simple script saved me money and I even shared it with some friends. You can also develop a ranking checker so SEOs can use it to check how their page ranks. This solves a real-world problem as marketers online are obsessed with how their pages rank. You can even make it specialized and develop it for specific websites such as Amazon and sellers on Amazon would be interested in it.
3. Lead Generation From Online Forums
Another key area in web scraping that has gained ground over the years is in the area of extracting emails and phone numbers from web pages online for the purpose of marketing.
Not everyone would believe people would respond to random emails they get and even buy a product but in reality, that happens a lot. Though this might be regarded as spam but when done right, it could be a fine-tuned process that the users wouldn’t consider spammy.
What this project entails is a little bit more than what people would call web scraping – it is web crawling. This involves crawling web pages on Internet forums that you know users drop their email and or and then extract any email address you come in contact with.
As stated earlier, you will need a mind shift from web scraping a little to web crawling as you will be traversing a number of pages you will only discover as the script discover them and add them to the queue.
You will need the knowledge of regular expression to be able to parse out emails from text. To make the script effective, you will need to visit some of the pages and see how some user disguise their email address to make them undetectable to web scrapers – so you could capture them also.
- The Best LinkedIn Automation Tools for Lead Generation
- How to Generate Business Lead Using Web scraping
4. Discount/ Best Price Finder Application
Some would call it a price comparison system but I choose to call it a price finder. Except money is ill-gotten or the person is just trying to show off, nobody wants to pay more for the same item he can get for less.
Interestingly, prices of the same product are not usually the same across online stores as each seller seeks to make a profit while trying to remain competitive – a lot of things go into deciding the price of items – and that is why differences exist. And sometimes, these differences can be great to actually make you want to dump one site for the other.
What this product entails is for you to create an application which can be in the form of a web or mobile app if you want to make it public and generate affiliate commission as travel and booking websites do that will accept the name of a product and search the best prices available across a selected list of e-commerce platforms online.
With the right plan, you can develop this project idea into a money-spinner that makes you money from affiliate sales you will generate if the application becomes successful. One thing you need to know with e-commerce platforms is that you will most likely get blocked if you do not incorporate measures to avoid getting detected as e-commerce platforms hate price monitors – and web scrapers with no anti-scraping bypass system easily identify themselves.
5. Bot for Stock or Cryptocurrency Trading
If you trade with your emotion, you are more likely to lose than to gain on the trades you engage in the stock or crypto market. If you have an interest in either stock or crypto trading, then why not utilize your coding and web scraping skills into developing a trading bot that would make informed decisions for you to make sure you earn money in the long run.
Trading is a strategic game with data at the helm of affairs. You will need historical data and data as they are generated to know the next trade action you would engage in. When you put together financial data and your unique winning trading strategy, then you have a system that works.
Yahoo Finance is one of the major sources of data for stock trading. As far as crypto, you can use any of the crypto exchanges available. Some of these exchanges provide you with an API that furnishes you with the data you need.
If such is the case, you won’t be web scraping. But in situations where the data you need is not supported by the API then you use web scraping. I once heard of someone that has a bot that detects newly launched crypto on PancakeSwap and becomes one of the first buyers and then sells immediately there is a pump – making a huge profit within minutes with web scraping and web automation.
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6. New Aggregation System
There is a lot of news sites to keep up with. However, as we grow older and more engaged, we find it difficult to follow all of our favorite sites and news. While you battle with this problem – you are not alone – a good number of persons are also battling with it.
How about you use web scraping to create a solution to this problem whereby all of the news from these sites are curated and presented to you in one interface without you necessarily having to visit the websites individually.
For new aggregation websites or applications, web scraping is a must and could be the major aspect of the application if you do not want it to be advanced.
However, if you want to add advanced features to it, then web scraping might become just a smaller part of the system. For this project, you can get it done pretty quickly if you know what you are doing and just looking for a fun project to flex your coding muscles.
However, if it is an academic project that would require some form of advanced features, then it could take a while especially if you need to introduce an AI to determine what news to include and which to exclude.
7. Political Text Analysis
Social media has become one of the greatest tools for political discussions. Take, for instance, Twitter with its hashtag system has been very popular for political ideology propagation. If you are interested in politics and you are a coder looking for a project to flex your web scraping skill, then what better way can you do that than analyze political discussions on social media platforms and make political sense out of it. You could analyze political tweets to find out the sentiment of voters towards a particular candidate in an upcoming poll. You can analyze all of the posts with a particular hashtag to determine what the majority of people think about that topic.
When it comes to the analysis of political discussions, there is always data to analyze as more and more people are taking their political ideologies online and some political movement even have their roots from the Internet. So, data when it comes to political analysis is not a problem and you can find it in any size on the Internet especially on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
8. Build a Job Search Portal
Are you aware that a good number of job search portals around get web scrapers to do the dirty job for them? Yes, the job posters do not go on all job search portals posting their opening. But somehow, you still see these jobs on all job sites. This is because some are glorified web scrapers – they spy on their competitors, waiting for a new listing, and then extract it and post it on their site.
You can replicate the whole idea by developing your own job searching portal that has a web scraper as the main data provider. It will go on other job sites, scraping jobs and then saving it in your database. You will then have a web interface where users can access the jobs.
- Indeed Scraper 101: How to Scrape Job Postings Data with Python
- How to Scrape Online Job Opportunities with Python
Depending on the amount of time and your skillset, you can make it advanced and make it public. You should be ready to integrate evasion techniques as your competitors would not watch you scraping their content without blocking you.
9. SEO Competitive Analysis
If you own a website or blog, then I will advise you to develop a web scraper that would be beneficial to your website. By doing this, you wouldn’t just be created a project you will dump immediately you are done – it will be a project you use regularly to improve your website. For this idea, you are going to be developing a web scraper that carries out a competitive analysis of your competitors’ websites.
You will need various web scrapers – one would be for on-page SEO to find out the keyword the competitor is optimizing for so. You would have one for discovering hidden site networks for backlinking purposes, and another for checking the ranking of all of your competitors and how the ranking and keyword SEOs change to determine how your competitors are changing tactics.
10. Hotel Price Prediction System
- Booking Scraper 101: How to Scrape Booking.com Data with Python
- How to Scrape Tripadvisor using Python & Beautifulsoup
As with other models, the more data you collect, the better your prediction engine becomes at predicting price. If you want more localized data, you can get hotel booking websites for your region and then use the data to build your model.
Conclusion
With the above, I am sure you can see that when it comes to web scraping project ideas, there is always the one you can work on if you are really ready. Web scraping is becoming popular among businesses that are data inclined and driven. Interestingly, the act of web scraping is considered legal provided you do not care damage to your target website and the web page you are assessing is not hidden behind a paywall.
