What Government Agencies Should Look for in Their Web Scraping Partners

Government agencies have an increased need for information, as the digital age has brought various technologies that generate data. It is through this data that government agencies can get more relevant information about their citizens.

Cities and municipalities are getting smarter, gaining access to information that can be used to make new government policies.

However, usually, government agencies don’t have the resource and knowledge to gather this kind of data and turn it into usable information, so they turn to web scraping partners. However, not all web scraping companies are a good fit for government agencies.

Usually, choosing a reliable web scraping partner is a time consuming and challenging task for every company because there are many criteria to pay attention to before making the decision. In this article, we will suggest key focus areas when choosing between different web scraping partners and will try to make your choice as easy as possible.

Ability to Bypass Anti-Scraping Measures

Web scraping puts a lot of strain on a targeted site, which is why websites often use various anti-scraping measures to prevent this. Crawlers send out hundreds of requests that disrupt websites and make it difficult for their visitors to navigate.

In some cases, a site can even crash completely. That’s why government agencies need partners to bypass these measures and get data from relevant sources. So, before hiring a scraping company, see if they can do this by:

• Adjusting scraping speed and intervals
• Bypassing “CAPTCHA” protection with image recognition tech
• Going around IP restrictions by switching to various servers
• Going around JavaScript crawling encryption

Ability to Adjust When Websites Are Modified

As you might know already, websites can come in many shapes and sizes, making web scraping a bit more complicated. However, with professionals who know what they are doing, this won’t be an issue. The most common problem is websites with modified layouts.

Websites can change their page layouts to prevent web scraping. For example, if there is a product listing, they might change the layout slightly for every five subsequent pages. These changes are slight, but they can confuse the bot and prevent it from scraping all the pages.

Crawlers often need a new code, and some have built-in features that let them adjust to different layouts. Sites also have “honeypot traps,” which are fake links that lead to empty pages. Not only will a web scraper not collect any data, but it can also be recognized. See if your potential partner can deal with this issue.

Stellar Customer Support

Government agencies need large amounts of data over a long period, which means that they need a reliable partner to work within the long run. Customer support is essential here, as many things can go wrong with web scraping.

If you get unstructured or corrupt data, you will have to report that back to your partner so that they can fix it. At the same time, the whole process can require various queries and questions that need to be discussed with the provider.

Customer support is essential, as this is an ongoing process that requires lots of back-and-forth communication. Whenever something goes wrong, you need to have multiple channels through which you can contact your partner.

Flexibility With Pricing Plans

Web scraping can involve a wide range of services. There are many requirements and factors that need to be taken into account to calculate the price. Look for companies that calculate prices based on your needs. Once they do that, you can ask what you are paying for and what they need to do.

Don’t go with companies that have a couple of different payment plans. They usually have hidden costs that you will be asked to pay for later on. Choose a transparent partner that gives you the utmost transparency of their pricing plans.

Data Quality and Orderly Delivery

There are different levels of data you can receive with web scraping, but you essentially need structured and clean data. All the scraped online data comes in large volumes with no structure whatsoever, so it’s up to the scraping provider to structure it and make it usable.

Be sure to talk about this before you start working with a company – you need to know how they deliver data, how it’s organized, and in which formats. Some of the most popular formats are CSV, JSON, and XML.

Conclusion

In the end, make sure to create a set of rules on how all this data is shared and who can access it. Government agencies look for data concerning citizens and their behavior. You can’t allow anyone to get a hold of this data, as they might try and abuse it in one way or another.