Businesses take into account various factors such as reviews, recommendations, competition, local area prices, demand, and other similar factors, yet there is a way to easily automate an application to help gather this data for you. Enter the Web Scraping API, which is a powerful tool to gather various types of data from the internet to later analyze them or consider them when considering improvements, price changes, marketing campaigns and more. Let me provide you a few things you must consider before web scraping a website:

Web scraping isn't illegal by itself because it helps you gather data that is already available to the public. It is always important to read the terms of service or obtain permission from website owners before attempting to scrape them because you don't know what content is copyrighted and which one can be considered as sensitive. People have gotten sued in the past for attempting to web scrape a website without prior permission, for example, you can find the LinkedIn lawsuit which had many users sued for scraping from their website without consent. Web scraping is a great way to get information advantage, but always be sure you have gotten permission first before web scraping a website.

Gathering personal data from customers, competition, or people, in general, is not a good idea and you may find yourself going against website policies when extracting these types of data. Many people protect their personal and even big companies may even file suit against companies that are extracting information that can be personal or sensitive for them. Be sure to check they allow you to gather the type of data you are looking for and always be sure to read their terms and conditions to make sure you are not breaking any rule.

By mistake, you can end up eating up a lot if not all the bandwidth of the website you are scraping data from, which can even become a bigger problem such as a denial of service. If you over traffic a website too much you may cause a denial of service for a specific network or service, and depending on the website you are scraping that downtime can cost a lot of money for them. Be sure not to over saturate the website's traffic with your request, so you can avoid a possible problematic legal problem. If web scraping goes unchecked it can easily saturate the server with request and bring down the website completely even for a few days. 

A robots.txt file is used to communicate between the web scrapers and the website itself and can indicate to you if the data you are looking to gather is being protected or not. Via checking robots.txt file (If you find it) you can easily determine whether the site or server you are about to scrap is good to go or better be avoided. A robots.txt is there to signal you whether you have the ok to scrape or not, so be sure to always follow the rules listed in these files. 

It is strongly recommended to always follow the rules, conditions, and terms of service provided on a website, and if these do not indicate web scraping it is recommended to contact them to get permission first. The data that can be gathered from web scraping is very valuable and can be using in many ways such as improvement, areas of high demand, competition pricing, get real-estate pricing and much more, yet you must ensure you have permission and are not breaking any rule by gathering the data from a specific website. 

Whenever you have the ok to web scrape a website means you can go ahead and gather the data you are looking for no matter if these are pictures, videos, audio, text and more but always be sure you are gathering enough information without having to affect the other website's bandwidth or traffic. Web scraping is an excellent solution to efficiently gathering data and it is recommended for many businesses to utilize an API such as the one found at zenscrape.com as a solution for your web scraping needs!

Many people even when performing projects have caused a denial of service and brought down the website they were testing too. Causing a denial of service can end you up with a suit being filed against you, so be sure you keep in check how much data you are gathering and how many requests are being sent to ensure the server doesn't become saturated.