More and more organizations are benefiting from the treasure-trove of data available on the Web to feed their text analytics applications and power information solutions for voice of the customer, buzz metrics, brand protection, anti-piracy and open source intelligence (OSINT).
Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the internet as a place to find and share data has – for the most part – come true. Unfortunately most of the data on the Web is locked into HTML and AJAX code with no easy way for a text analytics application to access it, at least not without getting a lot of noise that will spoil the results.
Traditionally companies use inefficient, expensive, old-fashion methods to collect Web data.
Unfortunately, as you can see in the figure, these methods typically cannot deliver valuable data a business analyst discovered when browsing the web for new data.
Today more and more companies are opening their eyes to a brand new and much more efficient way to extract precise data from thousands of websites in near real-time.
Companies are using Web Data Services to “free” the gold-mine of Web data.
Web Data Services accesses the data exactly the same way as a web browser, and can thus deliver 100% of the data an analyst wants. Now your company can leverage the gold-mine of web data to better understand your customers, competitors and market trends.
So my advice is: don’t waste your money on buying data from data providers. Get the data yourself!
To learn more about how Web data is a powerful tool for gathering real-time intelligence, I recommend you read my article, The Power of Social Media Data in Business, that I wrote for the Semantic Analytics 2010 conference in San Francisco.
Powerful, right!
By: Stefan Andreasen 
