Web data providers aggregate data from numerous data sources such as web pages, blogs, forums, etc., and provide this data across several industries. Data is readily available to be consumed by the clients via the usage of APIs that can be accessed for a nominal fee. Data types can include newsfeeds, blogs, forums, and publicly available on-demand data.
Web data providers consume data from billions of pages across the web and have the inherent capability to transform this unstructured data into structured data in different formats as required by the user.
Web data providers help index the web and can also create a repository or a database that is ready for use. This database consists of both live and historical data, making it extremely useful for business analysis and intelligence. Finally, some web data providers support APIs such as search APIs to return results which include news, social data sets, forums, blogs, government data, etc.
Web data providers are different from data extraction software and data extraction services since web data providers provide readymade data based on a repository and also restructure, filter, and format the data for immediate use by a client instead of ad hoc web scraping as per client requests. In addition, in several cases, web scraping providers or data extraction tools usually use web data providers to obtain data and provide it to their customers.
To qualify for inclusion in the Web Data Providers category, a product must:
- Provide real-time data from billions of web pages to ensure low latency
- Provide a searchable data repository for data users
- Transform unstructured data into structured data that can be accessed in various formats such as JSON, XML, etc.
