Why Common Measures Taken To Prevent Scraping Aren't Effective

Bots became more powerful in 2014. As the war continues, let’s take a closer look at why common strategies to prevent scraping didn’t pay off.

With the market for online businesses expanding rapidly, the development teams behind these online portals are under great amounts of pressure to keep up in the race. Scalability, availability and responsiveness are some of the commonly faced problems for a growing online business portal. As the value of content is increasing, content theft has become an increasing problem in the form of web scraping.

Competitors have learned to stay ahead of the race by using bots to scrape. While how these bots could be harmful is something worth talking about, it is not the main scope of this article. This article discusses some of the commonly used weapons to fight bots and brings to light their effectiveness in reality.

We come across many developers who claim to have taken measures to prevent their sites from being scraped. A common belief is that these below listed techniques reduce scraping activities significantly on a website. While some of these methods could actually work in concept, we were interested to explore how effective they were in practice.

Most Commonly used techniques to Prevent Scraping:

•    Setting up robots.txt – Surprisingly, this technique is used against malicious bots! Why this wouldn’t work is pretty straight forward – robots.txt is an agreement between websites and search engine bots to prevent search engine bots from accessing sensitive information. No malicious bot (or the scraper behind it) in it’s right mind would obey robots.txt. This is the most ineffective method to prevent scraping.

•    Filtering requests by User agent – The user agent string of a client is set by the client itself. One method is to obtain this from the HTTP header of a request. This way, a request can be filtered even before the content is served to the request. We observed that very few bots (approximately less than 10%), used the default user agent string which belonged to a scraping tool or was an empty string. Once their requests to the website were filtered based on the user agent, it didn’t take too long for scrapers to realize this and change their user agent to that of any well known browser. This method merely stops new bots written by inexperienced scrapers for a few hours.

•    Blacklisting the IP address – Seeking out to an IP blacklisting service is much easier than having to perform the hectic process of capturing more metrics from page requests and analyzing server logs. There are plenty of third party services which maintain a database of blacklisted IPs. In our hunt for a suitable blacklisting service, we found that using a third party DNSBL/RBL service was not effective as these services blacklisted only email spambot servers and were not effective in preventing scraping bots. Less than 2% of scraping bots were detected for one of our customer’s when we did a trial run.

•    Throwing CAPTCHA – A very well know practice to stop bots is to throw CAPTCHA on pages with sensitive content. Although effective against bots, CAPTCHA is thrown to all clients requesting the web page irrespective of whether it is a human or a bot. This method often antagonizes users and hence reduces traffic to the website. Some more insights to the new NO CAPTCHA Re-CAPTCHA by Google can be found in our previous blog post.

•    Honey pot or Honey trap – Honey pots are a brilliant trap mechanism to capture new bots (scrapers who are not well versed with structure of every page) on the website. But, this approach poses a lesser known threat of reducing the page rank on search engines. Here’s why – Search engine bots visit these links and might get trapped accidentally. Even if exceptions to the page were made by disallowing a set of known user agents, the links to the traps might be indexed by a search engine bot. These links are interpreted as dead, irrelevant or fake links by search engines. With more such traps, the ranking of the website decreases considerably. Furthermore, filtering requests based on user agent can exploited as discussed above. In short, honey pots are risky business which must be handled very carefully.

To summarize, these prevention strategies listed are either weak or require constant monitoring and regular maintenance to keep them effective. In practice bots are far more challenging than they actually seem to be.

What to expect in 2015?

With increasing need for scraping, the number of scraping tools and expert scrapers are also increasing which simply means bots are going to be an increasing problem. In fact, the usage of headless browsers i.e, browser like bots which are used to scrape are increasing and scrapers are no longer relying on wget, curl and html parsers. Preventing malicious bots from stealing content without actually disturbing the genuine traffic from humans and search engine bots is just going get harder. By the end of the year, we could infer from our database that almost half of an average website’s traffic is caused by bots. And a whopping 30-40% is caused by malicious bots. We believe this is only going to increase if we do not step up to take action!

p.s. If you think you are facing similar problems, why not request for more information? Also, if you do not have the time or bandwidth for taking such actions, scraping prevention and stopping malicious bots is something we provide as a service. How about a free trial?

Source:http://www.shieldsquare.com/why-common-measures-taken-to-prevent-scraping-arent-effective/

How You Can Identify Buying Preferences of Customers Using Data Mining Techniques

The New Gold Rush: Exploring the Untapped ‘Data Mining’ Reserves of Top 3 Industries

In a bid to reach new moms bang on time, Target knows when you’ll get pregnant. Microsoft knows Return on Investment (ROI) of each of its employee. Pandora knows what’s your current music mood. Amazing, isn’t it?

Call it the stereotype of mathematician nerds or Holy Grail of predictive analysts of modern day, Data Mining is the new gold rush for many industries.

Today, companies are mining data to predict exact actions of their prospective customers. That means, when a huge chunk of customer data is seen through a series of sophisticated, formatted and collective data mining process, it can help create future-ready content of marketing and buying messages, diminishing scope of errors and maximizing customer loyalty.

Also a progressive team of coders and statisticians help push the envelope as far as the marketing and business tactics are concerned by collecting data and mining practices that are empowering.

Mentioned below is a detailed low-down of three such industries (real estate, retail and automobile) where LoginWorks Software has employed the most talented predictive analysts and comprehensive behavioral marketing platforms in the industry. Let’s take a look.

Real Estate Industry Looks Past the Spray-And-Pray Marketing Tactic By Mining User Data.

A supremely competitive market that is to an extent unstructured too, the real estate industry needs to reap the advantageous benefits of data mining. And, we at LoginWorks Softwares understand this extremely well!

Our robust team of knowledge-driven analysts make sure that we predict future trends, process the old data and rank the areas using actionable predictive analytics techniques. By applying a long-term strategy to analyze the trend and to get hold of the influential factors that are invested in buying a property, our data warehouses excels in using classical techniques, such as Neural Network, C&R Tree, linear regression, Multilayer Perception Model and SPSS in order to uncover the hidden knowledge.

By using Big Data as the bedrock of our Predictive Marketing Platform, we help you zero-in on the best possible property available for your interest. Data from more than a dozen of reliable national and international resources to give you the most accurate and up-to-the minute data. Right from extracting a refined database of one’s neighbourhood insights to classic knowledge discovery of meaningful l techniques, our statisticians have proven accuracy. We scientifically predict your data by:

•    Understanding powerful insights that lead to property-buying decisions.
•    Studying properties and ranking them city-wise, based on their predictability of getting sold in the future.
•    Measuring trends at micro level by making use of Home Price Index, Market Strength Indicator, Automated Valuation Model and Investment analytics.

Our marketing platform consists of the mentioned below automated features:

Data Mining Techniques for Customer Relationship Management and Customer Retention in Retail Industry

Data mining to a retailer is what mining gold to a goldsmith would be! Priceless, to say the least. To understand the dynamics and suggestive patterns of customer habits, a retailer is always scouting for information to up his sales and generate future leads from existing and prospective consumers. Hence, sourcing your birth date information from your social media profiles to zooming upon your customer’s buying behaviour in different seasons.

For a retailer, data mining helps the customer information to transform a point of sale into a detailed understanding of (1) Customer Identification; (2) Customer Attraction; (3) Customer Retention; and (4) Customer Development. A retailer can score potential benefits by calculating Return on Investment (ROI) of its customers by:

•    Gaining customer loyalty and long-term association
•    Saving up on huge spend on non-targeted advertising and marketing costs
•    Accessing customer information, which leads to directly targeting the profitable customers
•    Extending product life cycle
•    Uncovering predictable buying patterns that leads to a decrease in spoilage, distribution costs and holding costs

Our specialised marketing team targets customers for retention by applying myriad levels of data mining techniques, in both technological and statistical perspective. We primarily make use of ‘basket’ analysis technique that unearths links between two distinct products and ‘visual’ mining techniques that helps in discovering the power of instant visual association and buying.

Role of Data Mining in Retail Sector

Spinning the Magic Wheel of Data Mining Algorithms in Automobile Industry of Today

Often called as the ‘industries of industries’. the automobile industry of today is robustly engrossed in constructing new plants, and extracting more production levels from existing plants. Like food manufacturing and drug companies, today, automakers are in an urgent need to build sophisticated data extraction processes to keep themselves all equipped for exuberantly expensive and reputation-damaging incidents. If a data analytics by Teradata Corp, a data analytics company, is to be believed then the “auto industry spends $45 billion to $50 billion a year on recalls and warranty claim”. A number potentially damaging for the automobile industry at-large, we reckon!

Hence, it becomes all the more imperative for an automobile company of repute to make use of enhanced methodology of data mining algorithms.

Our analysts would help you to spot insightful patterns, trends, rules, and relationships from scores and scores of information, which is otherwise next to impossible for the human eye to trace or process. Our avant-garde technicians understand that an automative manufacturing industry does not interact on one-to-one basis with the end consumers on a direct basis, hence we step into the picture and use our fully-integrated data mining feature to help you with the:

•    Supply chain procedure (pre-sales and post-sales services, inventory, orders, production plan).
•    Full A-Zee marketing facts and figures(dealers, business centers, social media handling, direct marketing tactics, etc).
•    Manufacturing detailing (car configurations/packages/options codes and description).
•    Customers’ inclination information (websites web-activities).

Impact of Big Data Analytics of Direct Vehicle Pricing

Bottom line

To wrap it all up, it is imperative to understand that the customer data is just as crucial for an actionable insights as your regular listings data. Behavioural data and predictive analysis is where the real deal lies, because at the end of the day it is all about targeting the right audience with the right context!

Move forward in your industry by availing LOGNWORKS SOFTWARES’ comprehensive, integrated, strategic and sophisticated Data Mining Services.

Source: http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/can-identify-buying-preferences-customers-using-data-mining-techniques/

Living Your Dream Life When Others Are Scraping Their Windshields

One Internet marketer once remarked that he knew he was successful when he was awakened one early winter morning by the sound of his neighbors scraping the ice off of their windshields so that they could drive to work. As he burrowed deeper under his covers, he grinned to himself and realized that while he wasn't sipping cocktails aboard his own yacht yet, he had reached an enviable measure of success. If you're ready to begin living your dream life, then you're ready to become an Internet marketer.

What does living your dream life mean to you? Does it mean being able to be your own boss and not having to adhere to another's schedule? Does living your dream life mean taking vacations to exotic locations? The beauty of Internet marketing is that you can realize your goals and live the life you choose. You can do all the things you've dreamed of doing and go to the places you've dreamed of seeing. You answer to no one but yourself, although most Internet marketers learn that they still have a boss even after they quit their jobs. That new boss, actually bosses, are your customers and you'll have to do a great job in order to get them and keep them.

Most Internet marketers, the ones who truly have an entrepreneurial spirit, are naturals when it comes to pleasing customers. They want to earn their business, they care about their needs and their likes and dislikes and will go out on a limb to satisfy their customers. While customer service is severely lacking in many of today's businesses, without it, you'll be dead in the water before you even get started. If living your dream life is important to you, plan now to offer the kind of customer service that no one else can rival.

Imagine living your dream life for the rest of your life. Imagine being able to take your family to the kinds of places you've only seen in movies and read about in books. Imagine having money in the bank to tide you over when times are tough and having the peace of mind of knowing that your home is not at risk. You can have all of this and more if you are willing to work hard. The rewards for Internet marketers aren't instant, but they are sweet and they can be yours.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Living-Your-Dream-Life-When-Others-Are-Scraping-Their-Windshields&id=2983939

How to Catch Content Scrapers?

Catching content scrapers is a tedious task and can take up a lot of time. The are few ways that you can utilize to catch content scrapers.

Search Google with Your Post Titles

Yup that is as painful as it sounds. This method is probably not worth it specially if you are writing about a very popular topic.

Trackbacks

If you add internal links in your posts, you will notice a trackback if a site steals your content. This way is pretty much the scraper telling you that they are scraping your content. If you are using Akismet, then a lot of these trackbacks will show up in the SPAM folder. Again, this will only work if you have internal links in your posts.

Webmaster Tools

If you use google webmaster tools, then you are probably aware of the Links to your site page. If you look under “Traffic”, you will see a page that says Links to your site. Chances are your scrapers will be among the top ones there. They will have hundreds if not thousands of links to your pages (considering that you have internal links).

Links to Your Site - Google Webmaster Tools

FeedBurner Uncommon Uses

If you have setup Feedburner for your WordPress blog, then you can see some uncommon uses. In the Analyze Tab under Feed Stats, you will see “Uncommon Uses”. There you will see a list of sites.

Source:http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-to-preventing-blog-content-scraping-in-wordpress/

Importance of Data Mining Services in Business

Data mining is used in re-establishment of hidden information of the data of the algorithms. It helps to extract the useful information starting from the data, which can be useful to make practical interpretations for the decision making.

It can be technically defined as automated extraction of hidden information of great databases for the predictive analysis. In other words, it is the retrieval of useful information from large masses of data, which is also presented in an analyzed form for specific decision-making. Although data mining is a relatively new term, the technology is not. It is thus also known as Knowledge discovery in databases since it grip searching for implied information in large databases.

It is primarily used today by companies with a strong customer focus - retail, financial, communication and marketing organizations. It is having lot of importance because of its huge applicability. It is being used increasingly in business applications for understanding and then predicting valuable data, like consumer buying actions and buying tendency, profiles of customers, industry analysis, etc. It is used in several applications like market research, consumer behavior, direct marketing, bioinformatics, genetics, text analysis, e-commerce, customer relationship management and financial services.

However, the use of some advanced technologies makes it a decision making tool as well. It is used in market research, industry research and for competitor analysis. It has applications in major industries like direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, scientific tests, genetics, financial services and utilities.

Data mining consists of major elements:

•    Extract and load operation data onto the data store system.

•    Store and manage the data in a multidimensional database system.

•    Provide data access to business analysts and information technology professionals.

•    Analyze the data by application software.

•    Present the data in a useful format, such as a graph or table.

The use of data mining in business makes the data more related in application. There are several kinds of data mining: text mining, web mining, relational databases, graphic data mining, audio mining and video mining, which are all used in business intelligence applications. Data mining software is used to analyze consumer data and trends in banking as well as many other industries.

Outsourcing Web Research offer complete Data Mining Services and Solutions to quickly collective data and information from multiple Internet sources for your Business needs in a cost efficient manner.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Importance-of-Data-Mining-Services-in-Business&id=2601221

Web Scraping Services, Data Recovery Software Adaptation Actions

Site scraping, also known as Web data mining, or Web harvesting, data mining software is a web site. Web scraping is closely related and similar web index, index Web content. Index of the pages is on most machines. The site scraping the difference between the focus on the translation of unstructured content network, usually rich text format, such as HTML, you should direct them to analyze data, and other spreadsheet or database. Network Piquing also makes web browsing more efficient and user productivity.

For example, the website, scraping compare prices on the Internet, automatic monitoring, and integrated changes in site identification and information. Agency enforcement actions and use of data scraping method to generate the benefits of file information relating to crime and criminal behavior.

Researchers have the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and network use scraping to collect information and statistical analysis of disease such as AIDS and influenza-like swine flu from the recent Influenza A (H1N1) epidemic. Run a program automatically when the data scraping is the only easy to collect data from another program.

Data scraping is a programmer product line generated by the system, it is no longer a useful way to date equipment. Generated data, and through the use of stripping data designed for use by the user. This clever, it is used to the software code can be used for public institutions.

A leading provider of Web scraping software's provides a wide range of user-based services company, can be cheap and easy way to extract and manage network data. Individuals can use to set up agents to seek regular information, then stores this information, and eventually released the information in several places. When the data system, individuals can change and reuse of these data and other applications, or simply use its intelligence.

All information is the host of safety and health classes and data warehousing, and by the user through the Internet Security Web console access. Some of the more software is called. Harvest is used to create a competitive intelligence and market information on the Web scrapers and network search. Script, network scraper can be stored in the form used will soon be ready.

Allow from all types of web pages, dynamic Ajax pages mark the safe area behind the complex unstructured HTML pages, and more data recovery software, to support adaptation actions. The software can also be exported in various formats, such as the data in Excel and other database programs. Web scraping software is used to collect too much information, no problem with a revolutionary device.

The program has the impact of many people or companies need to apply for comparable data from the Internet in different places, and useful information on the situation. A wide range of information, in a very short time detection method is relatively easy, very cost effective. The purpose of Web scraping software is used every day of commercial applications, and more data recovery software, to support adaptation actions.

The software can also be exported in various formats, such as the data in Excel and other database programs. Web scraping software is used to collect too much information, no problem with a revolutionary device. The pharmaceutical industry, meteorology, law enforcement agencies and government agencies.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/web-scraping-services-data-recovery-software-adaptation-actions-5884907.html

Data Scraping Services with Proxy Data Scraping

Have you ever heard of "data scraping? Data Scraping is the process of gathering relevant information in the public domain on the internet (private areas even if the conditions are met) and stored in databases or spreadsheets for later use in various applications. Scraping data technology is not new and a successful businessman his fortune by using data scraping technology.

Sometimes owners of sites that are not derived much pleasure from the automated harvesting of their data. Webmasters have learned to deny access to web scrapers their websites using tools or methods that some IP addresses to block the content of the site here. scrapers data is left to either target a different site, or the script to move the harvest of a computer using a different IP address each time and get as much information as possible to "all computers finally blocked the nozzle.

Fortunately, there is a modern solution to this problem. Proxy data scraping technology solves the problem by using a proxy IP addresses. When your data scraping program performs an extraction of a website, the site thinks that it comes from a different IP address. For site owner, proxies just like scratching a short period of increased traffic around the world. They have very limited resources and tedious to block such a scenario, but more importantly - for the most part, they simply do not know they are scraped.

Now you can ask. "Where can I proxy data scraping technology for my project" The "do-it-yourself solution is free, unfortunately, not easy at all Creation of a database scraping proxy network takes time and requires you to either a group of IP addresses and servers can be used in place yet, the computer guru you need to call to get everything configured. You may consider hiring proxy servers hosting providers to select, but this option is usually quite expensive, but probably better than the alternative: dangerous and unreliable servers (but free) public proxy.

There are literally thousands of free proxy servers located all over the world are fairly easy to use. The trick is to find them. Hundreds of sites, list servers, but by placing a functioning, open and supports standard protocols that you need to a lesson in perseverance, trial and error will be. However, if you manage to find a working public representatives, there are dangers inherent in their use. First, you do not know who owns the server or activities taking place elsewhere on the server. Send applications or sensitive data via an open proxy is a bad idea. It's easy enough for a proxy server to keep all information you send or send it back to you to catch. If you choose the method of replacing the public, make sure you never a transaction through which you or anyone else would jeopardize the case of unsavory types are made aware of the data to send.

A less risky scenario for data scraping proxy is to hire a proxy connection that runs through the rotation of a large number of private IP addresses. There are a number of these companies available that claim to remove all Web logs, which you harvest anonymously on the web with a minimal threat of retaliation. Companies such as enterprise solutions offer a large http://www.Anonymizer.com anonymous proxy, but often carry significant costs of installing enough for you to continue.

The other advantage is that companies that own such networks can often help design and implement a set of proxy data scraping custom program instead of trying to work with a generic bone scraping. After performing a simple Google search, I quickly found a company (www.ScrapeGoat.com) that an anonymous proxy server provides for data scraping purposes. Or, according to their website, if you want to make life even easier, scrap goat can retrieve data for you and a variety of different formats to deliver, often before you could finish up your plate from the scraping program.

Whatever path you choose for your data scraping proxy need not let a few simple tips to thwart access to all the wonderful information that is stored on the World Wide Web!

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/small-business-articles/data-scraping-services-with-proxy-data-scraping-4697825.html