The contribution of search engine mining and data gathering in the field of marketing is extremely impressive. Data mining provides accurate and useful data about customers and their purchase behaviors. It helps businesses, research organizations, and government departments collect relevant information to achieve particular business or organizational goals.
Without a doubt, data mining from search engines has allowed many marketers to narrow their marketing focus and direct their attention to potential customers. Note that search engine mining isn’t a replacement for traditional statistical techniques – it’s an extension of these techniques.
How Search Engine Mining Works
If you’re familiar with search engine mining or web scraping, you already know how to harvest information from websites using web browsers or the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). You also understand that proxy management is essential for any web scraping or data mining project.
Web scraping is the extraction of data from specific websites using their URLs. The scraper usually loads the HTML code of such sites and then extracts the required data. For instance, you can collect data about average prices or customer reviews on a given product.
Most miners use proxies for search engine scraping because they offer network connections and bypass website restrictions. Datacenter and residential proxies are usually the most used types of proxies.
Why Should You Use a Proxy for Data Mining and Scraping?
Stable Connection
Regardless of the data mining software you’re planning to use, the process will most likely take a considerable amount of your time. A stable connection is needed to avoid losing your progress while mining data. Imagine having only a few hours left to complete your data mining process, and suddenly you experience a network problem – that will be a waste of your time and effort. A proxy ensures that your network is stable throughout the mining process.
Security
Sometimes your web server might not be very secure or it may be unable to handle malicious entities it’s likely to encounter during the mining process. You definitely wouldn’t want to put yourself in a vulnerable position while mining crucial data. As such, you need the proxy to ensure your connection is secure throughout the operation. Besides having a secure connection, a proxy helps you hide your IP address – making the process smooth and successful.
Hiding Your IP Address
Well, you already know this. Here is why it’s crucial. Typically, if you search or pursue many web mining or scraping operations for some time, your IP address will most likely get banned. Google, Bing, and Yahoo can do this because they limit connection requests from one network.
A proxy for search engines solves this problem by replacing your unique IP address with several continuously rotating residential proxies. Residential proxies ensure you are invisible to servers of your target sites. These proxies will also let you choose your preferred virtual location, which solves your location problem. Whether you want your virtual location to be in Brazil, Australia, Singapore, or Russia, residential proxies offer total freedom and anonymity.
Here Is Why Search Engine Mining Is Still Strong
There is no doubt that search engine mining is still essential. Despite the economic challenges the world is experiencing right now, studies show an increase in demand for data in 2020. And these figures are expected to rise in the coming days. Here are some ways marketers and businesses use data collected from search engines to remain competitive in today’s ever-changing market.
Online Reputation
What is published on the internet will likely remain there for a long time. That means that a company or business that wants to build a good reputation for its goods or services should aim to uphold positive reviews. Data mining and scraping can be used to reveal information about a business on various platforms. For instance, scraping a social media site can help a business know what people think about its goods and services.
Price Comparison
Price comparison is essential to avoid overcharging or undercharging customers for similar or identical products and services. Given today’s competitive marketers, price comparison is becoming more and more common among online businesses. Data mining can be used to collect information about a competitor’s pricing, product descriptions, and stock quantity among other things.
This helps the business develop better pricing and marketing strategies that ensure they get more customers. If a business improves its marketing strategies compared to its competitors, it will have a competitive edge.
Fraud Prevention
With the evolution and advancements in online advertisement, fraudulent websites are also on the rise. Well, how often do you advertise your business online? Imagine losing all your advertising budget because your ad was manufactured by bots or placed on a fraudulent website.
That will be bad! Data mining can be used by advertisers to verify different ads, their location on the internet, and if their marketing is reaching the intended audience.