Golang Web Scraping, How Is It Done?

Gone are the days of manual data collection. Web scraping, a process utilised by companies worldwide, automates data collection and offers several uses.

Businesses use it to their maximum advantage, from lead generation to competitor analysis and market research to effective data management.

While most scraping tutorials focus on common web scraping languages, we’ll look at a relatively newer yet faster programming language called Go.

Before diving into the Golang web scraper and how it works, do check out some golang web scraping tips and tricks in a blog post here.

What Is Web Scraping?

If you’re tech-savvy, perhaps you’re already familiar with the term. Web scraping is a process of harvesting online data automatically.

Every business relies on data to analyse the market and see what works for them. As straightforward as it may sound, data collection is a significant and challenging business task. Luckily, web scraping makes it easier by implementing a web crawler or a bot.

You only need to set up a web scraper, and it’ll handle the job for you. It gathers and copies specific data from the web into a spreadsheet or a central database.

Later, you can retrieve and analyse it.

Benefits

Whether you run one of the top companies globally or are an amateur entrepreneur, you need web scraping to drive up your profit. Here are a few use cases of web scraping.

• Competitor monitoring. The outbreak of COVID-19 drastically changed Ecommerce. Now more than ever, consumers expect an enhanced online shopping experience. Perhaps you understand their needs, but what practises you need to follow to meet them can be known through competitor monitoring. See what your competitors are doing through scraping the web data and adjust your practices accordingly.
• Lead generation. Getting more leads is not a walk in the park. Purchasing a list of names sounds enticing, but they aren’t quality leads. Fortunately, web scraping allows you to perform efficient lead generation and collect important information on the go.
• Product optimization. Web scraping extracts data and enables you to see which products are performing well in the market. It also gives you an insight into customer behaviour regarding the product and their likes and dislikes. You can use this data to optimise your products.
• Price monitoring is crucial to know what works for your customers while equally benefitting from the profit. Setting up horrible prices won’t sell your product, regardless of its quality. Web scraping allows for quick price monitoring in a competitive niche.

What Is Golang?

Golang, also called Go, was created by Rob Pike, Robert Griesemer, and Ken Thompson. A few netizens believe that the idea of designing Go sprang from their mutual dislike for C++.

Go is an open-source and statically typed programming language meant to be efficient, simple, and high-performing.

Although the language was published in 2009, it was made open source in 2012. It was the same year the first version of Go was released.

In no time, the language became popular among developers due to its simplicity and efficiency. Besides, concurrency is another prominent feature that makes it well-liked among users.

One certainly cannot overlook a language like Go because numerous Ecommerce giants use it. Some popular ones include Netflix, Google, Docker, Twitch, Meta, and Uber.

How Can You Scrape the Web Using Golang Web Scraper?

Because Golang is rising in popularity, many developers wish to try it for web scraping projects. As such, they wonder how it works. Below, we’ll explain how you can set up a Golang web scraper to scrape the data from a target website.

Install Go

Follow the steps below to install Golang.

• Go to the downloads page. It will direct you to all the options available for downloading the language.
• You will come across five packages; you can pick the one according to your needs.
• When you choose a package and click on the blue link, Go starts downloading on your device.
• Make sure you choose a code editor or IDE compatible with Golang.

Get Familiar With Go and the Scraping Frameworks

Although Go is straightforward, there’s no harm in getting a deeper understanding for a smoother scraping project. You can watch a YouTube tutorial to see how it works.

Further, you must get familiar with varying scraping frameworks, from Ferret to Hakrawler and Soup to Colly.

Although it offers a wide selection of frameworks, Colly remains the most common one.

Make an HTTP GET Request

Golang offers HTTP libraries to connect and retrieve content. As soon as you enter a URL, the HTTP “get” will provide you with a GET request. Note that the timeout is zero, which can hang your app.

As such, you need to adjust the timeout. This can be done when creating a new client, which allows you to change the default settings and use the new one to open a web page. This will keep your app from hanging.

When you receive a timeout error, you can handle it accordingly.

Set Headers

Setting headers is always better before accessing a website. This allows the website owner to view the received client requests.

Use this code, “_, err = io.Copy(os.Stdout, response.Body)” to print the website data. However, you can do more than just retrieve the response body. For instance, you can parse the URLs or index pages.

Conclusion

Golang web scrapers can help you make your next scraping project successful. While we discussed a generic way to implement them, note that this isn’t the only method to use Go for scraping.

You can experiment with other techniques and see which one works best.