Web crawlers are used by online enterprises to search, extract and store information from any website. eCommerce sites extensively use them for research, monitoring competitor prices and copyright infringements.
Business challenges
The market today is flooded with a range of web crawlers. But implementing an efficient one is a major challenge. It is time consuming to crawl the entire website to extract information from it. A separate engine/app and high manual intervention is required to identify, extract and store desired content in the database. Due to the large volume of web pages, it is vital that crawlers are intelligent enough to prioritize download. Identification and extraction of selective content from desired pages is challenging. Web content change very frequently. As a result, by the time the crawler downloads that the last page from a website, it may have been modified or deleted.
Key benefits
- Enables eCommerce sites to collect near real time data from partner or competitor websites, facilitating extraction of product information: name, inventory, description, pricing, images, terms & conditions, etc
- Provides analytical functions and tools to create automatic pricing models for the products, helping customers make automatic price adjustments directly in the website using preset rules
- Helps reduce monthly operating costs, time spent in adjusting prices and updating product information for content aggregators
- Enables retail stores and distributors to monitor competitors’ prices before the feed is delivered by just sending a data feed to price comparison sites and affiliate networks
- Allows eCommerce businesses to maximize profit from near real time market intelligence and helps them offer best price deals
The solution
Mindtree’s customized crawler is an end-to-end solution that increases productivity through powerful, fully automated web data extraction. It is an intelligent solution that crawls only the required pages, extracts selective content and stores it as required. The stored content is then indexed, searched and displayed. It operates independently but can be easily integrated with online businesses using web services in any format – XML / JSON, etc.
