Monday, 30 September 2013

Web Scraper Shortcode WordPress Plugin Review

This short post is on the WP-plugin called Web Scraper Shortcode, that enables one to retrieve a portion of a web page or a whole page and insert it directly into a post. This plugin might be used for getting fresh data or images from web pages for your WordPress driven page without even visiting it. More scraping plugins and sowtware you can find in here.

To install it in WordPress go to Plugins -> Add New.
Usage

The plugin scrapes the page content and applies parameters to this scraped page if specified. To use the plugin just insert the

[web-scraper ]

shortcode into the HTML view of the WordPress page where you want to display the excerpts of a page or the whole page. The parameters are as follows:

    url (self explanatory)
    element – the dom navigation element notation, similar to XPath.
    limit – the maximum number of elements to be scraped and inserted if the element notation points to several of them (like elements of the same class).

The use of the plugin is of the dom (Data Object Model) notation, where consecutive dom nodes are stated like node1.node2; for example: element = ‘div.img’. The specific element scrape goes thru ‘#notation’. Example: if you want to scrape several ‘div’ elements of the class ‘red’ (<div class=’red’>…<div>), you need to specify the element attribute this way: element = ‘div#red’.
How to find DOM notation?

But for inexperienced users, how is it possible to find the dom notation of the desired element(s) from the web page? Web Developer Tools are a handy means for this. I would refer you to this paragraph on how to invoke Web Developer Tools in the browser (Google Chrome) and select a single page element to inspect it. As you select it with the ‘loupe’ tool, on the bottom line you’ll see the blue box with the element’s dom notation:


The plugin content

As one who works with web scraping, I was curious about  the means that the plugin uses for scraping. As I looked at the plugin code, it turned out that the plugin acquires a web page through ‘simple_html_dom‘ class:

    require_once(‘simple_html_dom.php’);
    $html = file_get_html($url);
    then the code performs iterations over the designated elements with the set limit

Pitfalls

    Be careful if you put two or more [web-scraper] shortcodes on your website, since downloading other pages will drastically slow the page load speed. Even if you want only a small element, the PHP engine first loads the whole page and then iterates over its elements.
    You need to remember that many pictures on the web are indicated by shortened URLs. So when such an image gets extracted it might be visible to you in this way: , since the URL is shortened and the plugin does not take note of  its base URL.
    The error “Fatal error: Call to a member function find() on a non-object …” will occur if you put this shortcode in a text-overloaded post.

Summary

I’d recommend using this plugin for short posts to be added with other posts’ elements. The use of this plugin is limited though.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/web-scraper-shortcode-wordpress-plugin-review/

Friday, 27 September 2013

Visual Web Ripper: Using External Input Data Sources

Sometimes it is necessary to use external data sources to provide parameters for the scraping process. For example, you have a database with a bunch of ASINs and you need to scrape all product information for each one of them. As far as Visual Web Ripper is concerned, an input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values.

An input data source is normally used in one of these scenarios:

    To provide a list of input values for a web form
    To provide a list of start URLs
    To provide input values for Fixed Value elements
    To provide input values for scripts

Visual Web Ripper supports the following input data sources:

    SQL Server Database
    MySQL Database
    OleDB Database
    CSV File
    Script (A script can be used to provide data from almost any data source)

To see it in action you can download a sample project that uses an input CSV file with Amazon ASIN codes to generate Amazon start URLs and extract some product data. Place both the project file and the input CSV file in the default Visual Web Ripper project folder (My Documents\Visual Web Ripper\Projects).

For further information please look at the manual topic, explaining how to use an input data source to generate start URLs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/visual-web-ripper-using-external-input-data-sources/

Thursday, 26 September 2013

Scraping Amazon.com with Screen Scraper

Let’s look how to use Screen Scraper for scraping Amazon products having a list of asins in external database.

Screen Scraper is designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases and web-languages. There is even a data-manager that allows one to make a connection to a database (MySQL, Amazon RDS, MS SQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, etc), and then the scripting in screen-scraper is agnostic to the type of database.

Let’s go through a sample scrape project you can see it at work. I don’t know how well you know Screen Scraper, but I assume you have it installed, and a MySQL database you can use. You need to:

    Make sure screen-scraper is not running as workbench or server
    Put the Amazon (Scraping Session).sss file in the “screen-scraper enterprise edition/import” directory.
    Put the mysql-connector-java-5.1.22-bin.jar file in the “screen-scraper enterprise edition/lib/ext” directory.
    Create a MySQL database for the scrape to use, and import the amazon.sql file.
    Put the amazon.db.config file in the “screen-scraper enterprise edition/input” directory and edit it to contain proper settings to connect to your database.
    Start the screen scraper workbench

Since this is a very simple scrape, you just want to run it in the workbench (most of the time you want to run scrapes in server mode). Start the workbench, and you will see the Amazon scrape in there, and you can just click the “play” button.

Note that a breakpoint comes up for each item. It would be easy to save the scraped details to a database table or file if you want. Also see in the database the “id_status” changes as each item is scraped.

When the scrape is run, it looks in the database for products marked “not scraped”, so when you want to re-run the scrapes, you need to:

UPDATE asin
SET `id_status` = 0

Have a nice scraping! ))

P.S. We thank Jason Bellows from Ekiwi, LLC for such a great tutorial.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/scraping-amazon-com-with-screen-scraper/

Using External Input Data in Off-the-shelf Web Scrapers

There is a question I’ve wanted to shed some light upon for a long time already: “What if I need to scrape several URL’s based on data in some external database?“.

For example, recently one of our visitors asked a very good question (thanks, Ed):

    “I have a large list of amazon.com asin. I would like to scrape 10 or so fields for each asin. Is there any web scraping software available that can read each asin from a database and form the destination url to be scraped like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/{asin} and scrape the data?”

This question impelled me to investigate this matter. I contacted several web scraper developers, and they kindly provided me with detailed answers that allowed me to bring the following summary to your attention:
Visual Web Ripper

An input data source can be used to provide a list of input values to a data extraction project. A data extraction project will be run once for each row of input values. You can find the additional information here.
Web Content Extractor

You can use the -at”filename” command line option to add new URLs from TXT or CSV file:

    WCExtractor.exe projectfile -at”filename” -s

projectfile: the file name of the project (*.wcepr) to open.
filename – the file name of the CSV or TXT file that contains URLs separated by newlines.
-s – starts the extraction process

You can find some options and examples here.
Mozenda

Since Mozenda is cloud-based, the external data needs to be loaded up into the user’s Mozenda account. That data can then be easily used as part of the data extracting process. You can construct URLs, search for strings that match your inputs, or carry through several data fields from an input collection and add data to it as part of your output. The easiest way to get input data from an external source is to use the API to populate data into a Mozenda collection (in the user’s account). You can also input data in the Mozenda web console by importing a .csv file or importing one through our agent building tool.

Once the data is loaded into the cloud, you simply initiate building a Mozenda web agent and refer to that Data list. By using the Load page action and the variable from the inputs, you can construct a URL like http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/%asin%.
Helium Scraper

Here is a video showing how to do this with Helium Scraper:


The video shows how to use the input data as URLs and as search terms. There are many other ways you could use this data, way too many to fit in a video. Also, if you know SQL, you could run a query to get the data directly from an external MS Access database like
SELECT * FROM [MyTable] IN "C:\MyDatabase.mdb"

Note that the database needs to be a “.mdb” file.
WebSundew Data Extractor
Basically this allows using input data from external data sources. This may be CSV, Excel file or a Database (MySQL, MSSQL, etc). Here you can see how to do this in the case of an external file, but you can do it with a database in a similar way (you just need to write an SQL script that returns the necessary data).
In addition to passing URLs from the external sources you can pass other input parameters as well (input fields, for example).
Screen Scraper

Screen Scraper is really designed to be interoperable with all sorts of databases. We have composed a separate article where you can find a tutorial and a sample project about scraping Amazon products based on a list of their ASINs.


Source: http://extract-web-data.com/using-external-input-data-in-off-the-shelf-web-scrapers/

Tuesday, 24 September 2013

Selenium IDE and Web Scraping

Selenium is a browser automation framework that includes IDE, Remote Control server and bindings of various flavors including Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and other. In this post we touch on the basic structure of the framework and its application to  Web Scraping.
What is Selenium IDE


Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox plugin, and it allows recording browsers’ interactions in order to edit them. This works well for software tests, composing and debugging. The Selenium Remote Control is a server specific for a particular environment; it causes custom scripts to be implemented for controlled browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and iOS. How various Selenium components are supported with major browsers read here.
What does Selenium do and Web Scraping

Basically Selenium automates browsers. This ability is no doubt to be applied to web scraping. Since browsers (and Selenium) support JavaScript, jQuery and other methods working with dynamic content why not use this mix for benefit in web scraping, rather than to try to catch Ajax events with plain code? The second reason for this kind of scrape automation is browser-fasion data access (though today this is emulated with most libraries).

Yes, Selenium works to automate browsers, but how to control Selenium from a custom script to automate a browser for web scraping? There are Selenium PHP and other language libraries (bindings) providing for scripts to call and use Selenium. It is possible to write Selenium clients (using the libraries) in almost any language we prefer, for example Perl, Python, Java, PHP etc. Those libraries (API), along with a server, the Java written server that invokes browsers for actions, constitute the Selenum RC (Remote Control). Remote Control automatically loads the Selenium Core into the browser to control it. For more details in Selenium components refer to here.


A tough scrape task for programmer

“…cURL is good, but it is very basic.  I need to handle everything manually; I am creating HTTP requests by hand.
This gets difficult – I need to do a lot of work to make sure that the requests that I send are exactly the same as the requests that a browser would
send, both for my sake and for the website’s sake. (For my sake
because I want to get the right data, and for the website’s sake
because I don’t want to cause error messages or other problems on their site because I sent a bad request that messed with their web application).  And if there is any important javascript, I need to imitate it with PHP.
It would be a great benefit to me to be able to control a browser like Firefox with my code. It would solve all my problems regarding the emulation of a real browser…
it seems that Selenium will allow me to do this…” -Ryan S

Yes, that’s what we will consider below.
Scrape with Selenium

In order to create scripts that interact with the Selenium Server (Selenium RC, Selenium Remote Webdriver) or create local Selenium WebDriver script, there is the need to make use of language-specific client drivers (also called Formatters, they are included in the selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi package). The Selenium servers, drivers and bindings are available at Selenium download page.
The basic recipe for scrape with Selenium:

    Use Chrome or Firefox browsers
    Get Firebug or Chrome Dev Tools (Cntl+Shift+I) in action.
    Install requirements (Remote control or WebDriver, libraries and other)
    Selenium IDE : Record a ‘test’ run thru a site, adding some assertions.
    Export as a Python (other language) script.
    Edit it (loops, data extraction, db input/output)
    Run script for the Remote Control

The short intro Slides for the scraping of tough websites with Python & Selenium are here (as Google Docs slides) and here (Slide Share).
Selenium components for Firefox installation guide

For how to install the Selenium IDE to Firefox see  here starting at slide 21. The Selenium Core and Remote Control installation instructions are there too.
Extracting for dynamic content using jQuery/JavaScript with Selenium

One programmer is doing a similar thing …

1. launch a selenium RC (remote control) server
2. load a page
3. inject the jQuery script
4. select the interested contents using jQuery/JavaScript
5. send back to the PHP client using JSON.

He particularly finds it quite easy and convenient to use jQuery for
screen scraping, rather than using PHP/XPath.
Conclusion

The Selenium IDE is the popular tool for browser automation, mostly for its software testing application, yet also in that Web Scraping techniques for tough dynamic websites may be implemented with IDE along with the Selenium Remote Control server. These are the basic steps for it:

    Record the ‘test‘ browser behavior in IDE and export it as the custom programming language script
    Formatted language script runs on the Remote Control server that forces browser to send HTTP requests and then script catches the Ajax powered responses to extract content.

Selenium based Web Scraping is an easy task for small scale projects, but it consumes a lot of memory resources, since for each request it will launch a new browser instance.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/selenium-ide-and-web-scraping/

Monday, 23 September 2013

What You Need to Do Before Online Data Collection

Data collection is collecting useful intelligence for making decisions such as product price determination. Nowadays, available on websites, directories, B2B/B2C platforms, e-books, e-newspaper, yellow page, official data, accessible databases, vast and updated information online encourages more people to collect data from the Internet. Before data mining, you still need to be well prepared, as the ancient Chinese saying says "Preparedness ensures success, unpreparedness spells failure."

#1. Why do you want to collect intelligence or what's your objective? What will you do with this intelligence after collection? Making a description of your project can help the data mining team have a better understanding of your aim. Taking an example, an objective can be I want to collect enough intelligence to determine a competitive price for my product.

#2. What type of information you need to collect to support your final analysis / decision? Such as, if you want to collect the prices of similar product, product specification are necessary to collect for comparison of the same one. The external factors like coupon, gifts or tax also need to be considered for accuracy.

#3. Where? General searching using keywords or gathering data from specific resources or database depends on project nature. The information from e-commerce websites would be a great avenue for price gathering and product specification.

#4. Who? Will you collect the data by using the resources of your own or outside resources? Outsourcing of online research work to lower wages countries with the accessibility of internet capabilities and vast English educated personnel like China would be an option for cutting cost. The people who are going to do the work need training and necessary resources on that.

#5. How? Always remember your purpose of collecting data to improve the collection process. The methodology and process need to be defined to ensure accurate and reliable data. Decisions making on wrong data would result in serious problems.

I've summarized 5 tips from myself and my clients' experiences [http://www.co-soft.net/Case_Study/Web_Research_Web_Data_Extraction.asp], hopefully to provide some insights for you. If you have any opinion or experience in online data gathering or outsourcing, please share with me via lily@co-soft.net.

Lily Shang, the Marketing Manager of Cosoft Co. Ltd. which is one of the leading players in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and IT segments with strong domain knowledge and quality driven processes in China.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?What-You-Need-to-Do-Before-Online-Data-Collection&id=3365311

What Poker Data Mining Can Do for a Player

Anyone who wants to be more successful in many poker rooms online should take a look at what poker data mining can do. Poker data mining involves looking into all of the past hands in a series of poker games. This can be used to help with reviewing the ways how a player plays the game of poker. This will help to determine how well someone is working when trying to play this exciting game.

Poker data mining works in that a player will review all of the past hands that a player has gotten into. This includes taking a look at the individual hands that were involved. Every single card, bet and movement will be recorded in a hand.

All of the hands can be combined to help with figuring out the wins and losses in a game alongside all of the strategies that had been used throughout the course of a game. The analysis will be used to determine how well a player has gone in a game.

The review will be used to figure out the changes in one's winnings over the course of time. This can be used in conjunction with different types of things that are going on in a game and how the game is being played. This will be used to help figure out what is going on in a game and to see what should be done correctly and what should not be handled.

The data mining that is used is handled by a variety of different kinds of online poker sites. Many of these sites will allow its customers to buy information on various previous hands that they have gotten into. This is used by all of these places as a means of helping to figure out how well a player has done in a game.

Not all places are going to offer support for poker data mining. Some of these places will refuse to work with it due to how they might feel that poker data mining will give a player an unfair advantage over other players who are not willing to pay for it. The standards that these poker rooms will have are going to vary. It helps to review policies of different places when looking to use this service.

Poker data mining can prove to be a beneficial function for anyone to handle. Poker data mining can be smart because of how it can help to get anyone to figure out how one's hand histories are working in a poker room. It will be important to see that this is not accepted in all places though. Be sure to watch for this when playing the game of poker and looking to succeed in it.

The use of poker data mining as well as poker software is being increasingly used by many poker players in order to learn and improve their game.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?What-Poker-Data-Mining-Can-Do-for-a-Player&id=5563778

Saturday, 21 September 2013

Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:
• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection
Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:
• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction-Services-and-Data-Collection-Form-Website-Pages&id=4860417

Friday, 20 September 2013

The Truth Behind Data Mining Outsourcing Service

We have come to this what we call the information era where industries are craving for useful data needed for decision making, product creations - among other vital uses for business. Data mining and converting them to become useful information is part of this trend which makes businesses to grow to their optimum potentials. However, a lot of companies cannot handle by themselves alone the processes data mining involved as they are just overwhelmed by other important tasks. This is where data mining outsourcing comes into play.

There have been a lot of definitions introduced but it can simply be explained as a process that includes sorting through huge amounts of raw data to be able to extract valuable information needed by industries and businesses in various fields. In most cases, this is done by professionals, business organizations, and financial analysts. There has been a rapid growth in the number of sectors or groups who are getting into it though.

There are a number of reasons why there is a rapid growth in data mining outsourcing service subscriptions. Some of these are presented below:

Wide Array of services included

A lot of companies are turning to data mining outsourcing because it caters a lot of services. Such services include, but not limited to congregation data from websites into database applications, collecting contact information from various websites, extracting data from websites using software, sorting stories from news sources, and accumulating business information from competitors.

A lot of companies are benefiting

A lot of industries are benefiting from it because it is quick and feasible. Information extracted by data mining outsourcing service providers are used in crucial decision-making in the area of direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relation management, health care, scientific test and other experimental endeavor, telecommunications, financial services, and a whole lot more.

Have a lot of advantages

Subscribing for data mining outsourcing service offers many advantages because providers ensure clients of rendering services with global standards. They strive to work with improved technology scalability, advanced infrastructure resources, quick turnaround time, cost-effective prices, more secure network system to ensure information safety, and increased market coverage.

Outsourcing allows companies to concentrate in their core business operations and therefore can improve overall productivity. No wonder why data mining outsourcing has been a prime choice of many businesses - it propels business towards greater profits.

Wanda Jones is the owner of the Captive Center blog, a blog that contains articles related to Captive Center Outsourcing



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Truth-Behind-Data-Mining-Outsourcing-Service&id=3595955

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

One of the Main Differences Between Statistical Analysis and Data Mining

Two methods of analyzing data that are common in both academic and commercial fields are statistical analysis and data mining. While statistical analysis has a long scientific history, data mining is a more recent method of data analysis that has arisen from Computer Science. In this article I want to give an introduction to these methods and outline what I believe is one of the main differences between the two fields of analysis.

Statistical analysis commonly involves an analyst formulating a hypothesis and then testing the validity of this hypothesis by running statistical tests on data that may have been collected for the purpose. For example, if an analyst was studying the relationship between income level and the ability to get a loan, the analyst may hypothesis that there will be a correlation between income level and the amount of credit someone may qualify for.

The analyst could then test this hypothesis with the use of a data set that contains a number of people along with their income levels and the credit available to them. A test could be run that indicates for example that there may be a high degree of confidence that there is indeed a correlation between income and available credit. The main point here is that the analyst has formulated a hypothesis and then used a statistical test along with a data set to provide evidence in support or against that hypothesis.

Data mining is another area of data analysis that has arisen more recently from computer science that has a number of differences to traditional statistical analysis. Firstly, many data mining techniques are designed to be applied to very large data sets, while statistical analysis techniques are often designed to form evidence in support or against a hypothesis from a more limited set of data.

Probably the mist significant difference here, however, is that data mining techniques are not used so much to form confidence in a hypothesis, but rather extract unknown relationships may be present in the data set. This is probably best illustrated with an example. Rather than in the above case where a statistician may form a hypothesis between income levels and an applicants ability to get a loan, in data mining, there is not typically an initial hypothesis. A data mining analyst may have a large data set on loans that have been given to people along with demographic information of these people such as their income level, their age, any existing debts they have and if they have ever defaulted on a loan before.

A data mining technique may then search through this large data set and extract a previously unknown relationship between income levels, peoples existing debt and their ability to get a loan.

While there are quite a few differences between statistical analysis and data mining, I believe this difference is at the heart of the issue. A lot of statistical analysis is about analyzing data to either form confidence for or against a stated hypothesis while data mining is often more about applying an algorithm to a data set to extract previously unforeseen relationships.

The author has a number of websites that provide financial calculators including the sites mortgage calculator amortization and refinance calculator mortgage.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?One-of-the-Main-Differences-Between-Statistical-Analysis-and-Data-Mining&id=4578250

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Data scrape is the process of extracting data from web by using software program from proven website only. Extracted data any one can use for any purposes as per the desires in various industries as the web having every important data of the world. We provide best of the web data extracting software. We have the expertise and one of kind knowledge in web data extraction, image scrapping, screen scrapping, email extract services, data mining, web grabbing.

Who can use Data Scraping Services?

Data scraping and extraction services can be used by any organization, company, or any firm who would like to have a data from particular industry, data of targeted customer, particular company, or anything which is available on net like data of email id, website name, search term or anything which is available on web. Most of time a marketing company like to use data scraping and data extraction services to do marketing for a particular product in certain industry and to reach the targeted customer for example if X company like to contact a restaurant of California city, so our software can extract the data of restaurant of California city and a marketing company can use this data to market their restaurant kind of product. MLM and Network marketing company also use data extraction and data scrapping services to to find a new customer by extracting data of certain prospective customer and can contact customer by telephone, sending a postcard, email marketing, and this way they build their huge network and build large group for their own product and company.

We helped many companies to find particular data as per their need for example.

Web Data Extraction

Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. Because of this, tool kits that scrape web content were created. A web scraper is an API to extract data from a web site. We help you to create a kind of API which helps you to scrape data as per your need. We provide quality and affordable web Data Extraction application

Data Collection

Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using info structures suited for automated processing by computers, not people. Such interchange formats and protocols are typically rigidly structured, well-documented, easily parsed, and keep ambiguity to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human-readable at all. That's why the key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user.

Email Extractor

A tool which helps you to extract the email ids from any reliable sources automatically that is called a email extractor. It basically services the function of collecting business contacts from various web pages, HTML files, text files or any other format without duplicates email ids.

Screen scrapping

Screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text information from a computer display terminal's screen and collecting visual data from a source, instead of parsing data as in web scraping.

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services is the process of extracting patterns from information. Datamining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform the data into information. Any format including MS excels, CSV, HTML and many such formats according to your requirements.

Web spider

A Web spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Web Grabber

Web grabber is just a other name of the data scraping or data extraction.

Web Bot

Web Bot is software program that is claimed to be able to predict future events by tracking keywords entered on the Internet. Web bot software is the best program to pull out articles, blog, relevant website content and many such website related data We have worked with many clients for data extracting, data scrapping and data mining they are really happy with our services we provide very quality services and make your work data work very easy and automatic.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Web-Data-Extraction-Services-Will-Save-Your-Time-and-Money-by-Automatic-Data-Collection&id=5159023

Monday, 16 September 2013

When Computer Systems Fail, Professional Data Recovery Can Set Your Mind at Rest

Computer systems are prone to data loss with relative regularity, often precisely because they are always becoming faster and more complex. Data loss can take the form of crashes, corrupted hard disks and server failures.

A professional service will swiftly send a courier to collect the failed hard disk. Back at the laboratory, technicians will mount a close inspection of the hard drive in order to provide the client with an estimate of the severity of the problem, the length of time that it will take to fix and the cost of data recovery.

A timescale for data recovery will be agreed with the client before the hard disk is repaired and data restructures restored, the raw data is extracted and the file listings are analysed. Data files are usually returned on new media, such as DVDs or an external hard drive.

The length of time that it can take to recover data from a crashed system depends upon the nature of the crash. The failure can be due to something relatively simple, such as a crash of the computer's operating system or simple human error. However, there can be more complex reasons for a crash, such as attacks by hackers or infection by computer viruses or malware. Most seriously of all, hard drives can become physically damaged or corrupted.

A simple problem with the operating system usually means that all the technician has to do is use their expertise to extract the data and copy it on to a new form of media, such as another hard drive or disk.

In the event of a faulty or corrupt hard drive, the technicians will have to take more drastic steps, such as making repairs to the file directory itself or by attempting to retrieve the data with the use of specialised software.

In this scenario, the technician will use a powerful microscope to examine the hard drive itself for signs of damage. A similar analysis will be carried out on the system's electronics and electrical systems, such as its power source, servos and interfaces. The technician will carry out the same level of examination for the drive's magnetic media, such as its read/write heads.

If the examination reveals faults or complete breakdown, the offending components will be repaired or completely replaced, allowing the disk itself to be cleaned under safe, clean lab conditions, before being upgraded and reprogrammed.

The disk will now be functional once more, whereupon the all-important data will be able to be accessed and extracted. Professional data recovery services have special proprietary programs to read any data stored on the disk's magnetic platters.

When the data is extracted, it will be transferred to the lab's own secure servers, before being carefully checked for errors and gaps. If any bad sectors are found, they will be repaired in consultation with the client.

Olivia has 2 years experience writing articles about data recovery. She also enjoys writing articles on various other subjects.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?When-Computer-Systems-Fail,-Professional-Data-Recovery-Can-Set-Your-Mind-at-Rest&id=2394338

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Using Data Mining Services

In today's globalized marketplace Customer relationship management (CRM) is deemed as crucial business activity to compete efficiently and outdone the competition. CRM strategies heavily depend on how effectively you can use the customer information in meeting their needs and expectations which in turn leads to more profit.

Some basic questions include - what are their specific needs, how satisfied they are with your product or services, is there a scope of improvement in existing product/service and so on. For better CRM strategy you need a predictive data mining models fueled by right data and analysis. Let me give you a basic idea on how you can use Data mining for your CRM objective.

Basic process of CRM data mining includes:
1. Define business goal
2. Construct marketing database
3. Analyze data
4. Visualize a model
5. Explore model
6. Set up model & start monitoring

Let me explain last three steps in detail.

Visualize a Model:
Building a predictive data model is an iterative process. You may require 2-3 models in order to discover the one that best suit your business problem. In searching a right data model you may need to go back, do some changes or even change your problem statement.

In building a model you start with customer data for which the result is already known. For example, you may have to do a test mailing to discover how many people will reply to your mail. You then divide this information into two groups. On the first group, you predict your desired model and apply this on remaining data. Once you finish the estimation and testing process you are left with a model that best suits your business idea.

Explore Model:
Accuracy is the key in evaluating your outcomes. For example, predictive models acquired through data mining may be clubbed with the insights of domain experts and can be used in a large project that can serve to various kinds of people. The way data mining is used in an application is decided by the nature of customer interaction. In most cases either customer contacts you or you contact them.

Set up Model & Start Monitoring:
To analyze customer interactions you need to consider factors like who originated the contact, whether it was direct or social media campaign, brand awareness of your company, etc. Then you select a sample of users to be contacted by applying the model to your existing customer database. In case of advertising campaigns you match the profiles of potential users discovered by your model to the profile of the users your campaign will reach.

In either case, if the input data involves income, age and gender demography, but the model demands gender-to-income or age-to-income ratio then you need to transform your existing database accordingly.





Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Customer-Relationship-Management-%28CRM%29-Using-Data-Mining-Services&id=4641198

Friday, 13 September 2013

What's Your Excuse For Not Using Data Mining?

In an earlier article I briefly described how data mining and RFM analysis can help marketers be more efficient (read... increased marketing ROI!). These marketing analytics tools can significantly help with all direct marketing efforts (multichannel campaign management efforts using direct mail, email and call center) and some interactive marketing efforts as well. So, why aren't all companies using it today? Well, typically it comes down to a lack of data and/or statistical expertise. Even if you don't have data mining expertise, YOU can benefit from data mining by using a consultant. With that in mind, let's tackle the first problem -- collecting and developing the data that is useful for data mining.

The most important data to collect for data mining include:

oTransaction data - For every sale, you at least need to know the product and the amount and date of the purchase.

oPast campaign response data - For every campaign you've run, you need to identify who responded and who didn't. You may need to use direct and indirect response attribution.

oGeo-demographic data - This is optional, but you may want to append your customer file/database with consumer overlay data from companies like Acxiom.

oLifestyle data - This is also an optional append of indicators of socio-economic lifestyle that are developed by companies like Claritas. All of the above data may or may not exist in the same data source. Some companies have a single holistic view of the customer in a database and some don't. If you don't, you'll have to make sure all data sources that contain customer data have the same customer ID/key. That way, all of the needed data can be brought together for data mining.

How much data do you need for data mining? You'll hear many different answers, but I like to have at least 15,000 customer records to have confidence in my results.

Once you have the data, you need to massage it to get it ready to be "baked" by your data mining application. Some data mining applications will automatically do this for you. It's like a bread machine where you put in all the ingredients -- they automatically get mixed, the bread rises, bakes, and is ready for consumption! Some notable companies that do this include KXEN, SAS, and SPSS. Even if you take the automated approach, it's helpful to understand what kinds of things are done to the data prior to model building.

Preparation includes:

oMissing data analysis. What fields have missing values? Should you fill in the missing values? If so, what values do you use? Should the field be used at all?

oOutlier detection. Is "33 children in a household" extreme? Probably - and consequently this value should be adjusted to perhaps the average or maximum number of children in your customer's households.

oTransformations and standardizations. When various fields have vastly different ranges (e.g., number of children per household and income), it's often helpful to standardize or normalize your data to get better results. It's also useful to transform data to get better predictive relationships. For instance, it's common to transform monetary variables by using their natural logs.

oBinning Data. Binning continuous variables is an approach that can help with noisy data. It is also required by some data mining algorithms.

More to come on data mining for marketers in my next article.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Whats-Your-Excuse-For-Not-Using-Data-Mining?&id=3576029

Thursday, 12 September 2013

Limitations and Challenges in Effective Web Data Mining

Web data mining and data collection is critical process for many business and market research firms today. Conventional Web data mining techniques involve search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc and keyword, directory and topic-based searches. Since the Web's existing structure cannot provide high-quality, definite and intelligent information, systematic web data mining may help you get desired business intelligence and relevant data.

Factors that affect the effectiveness of keyword-based searches include:
• Use of general or broad keywords on search engines result in millions of web pages, many of which are totally irrelevant.
• Similar or multi-variant keyword semantics my return ambiguous results. For an instant word panther could be an animal, sports accessory or movie name.
• It is quite possible that you may miss many highly relevant web pages that do not directly include the searched keyword.

The most important factor that prohibits deep web access is the effectiveness of search engine crawlers. Modern search engine crawlers or bot can not access the entire web due to bandwidth limitations. There are thousands of internet databases that can offer high-quality, editor scanned and well-maintained information, but are not accessed by the crawlers.

Almost all search engines have limited options for keyword query combination. For example Google and Yahoo provide option like phrase match or exact match to limit search results. It demands for more efforts and time to get most relevant information. Since human behavior and choices change over time, a web page needs to be updated more frequently to reflect these trends. Also, there is limited space for multi-dimensional web data mining since existing information search rely heavily on keyword-based indices, not the real data.

Above mentioned limitations and challenges have resulted in a quest for efficiently and effectively discover and use Web resources. Send us any of your queries regarding Web Data mining processes to explore the topic in more detail.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Limitations-and-Challenges-in-Effective-Web-Data-Mining&id=5012994

Tuesday, 10 September 2013

Understanding Data Mining

Well begun is half done. We can say that the invention of Internet is the greatest invention of the century which allows for quick information retrieval. It also has negative aspects, as it is an open forum therefore differentiating facts from fiction seems tough. It is the objective of every researcher to know how to perform mining of data on the Internet for accuracy of data. There are a number of search engines that provide powerful search results.

Knowing File Extensions in Data Mining

For mining data the first thing is important to know file extensions. Sites ending with dot-com are either commercial or sales sites. Since sales is involved there is a possibility that the collected information is inaccurate. Sites ending with dot-gov are of government departments, and these sites are reviewed by professionals. Sites ending with dot-org are generally for non-profit organizations. There is a possibility that the information is not accurate. Sites ending with dot-edu are of educational institutions, where the information is sourced by professionals. If you do not have an understanding you may take help of professional data mining services.

Knowing Search Engine Limitations for Data Mining

Second step is to understand when performing data mining is that majority search engines have filtering, file extension, or parameter. These are restrictions to be typed after your search term, for example: if you key in "marketing" and click "search," every site will be listed from dot-com sites having the term "marketing" on its website. If you key in "marketing site.gov," (without the quotation marks) only government department sites will be listed. If you key in "marketing site:.org" only non-profit organizations in marketing will be listed. However, if you key in "marketing site:.edu" only educational sites in marketing will be displayed. Depending on the kind of data that you want to mine after your search term you will have to enter "site.xxx", where xxx will being replaced by.com,.gov,.org or.edu.

Advanced Parameters in Data Mining

When performing data mining it is crucial to understand far beyond file extension that it is even possible to search particular terms, for example: if you are data mining for structural engineer's association of California and you key in "association of California" without quotation marks the search engine will display hundreds of sites having "association" and "California" in their search keywords. If you key in "association of California" with quotation marks, the search engine will display only sites having exactly the phrase "association of California" within the text. If you type in "association of California" site:.com, the search engine will display only sites having "association of California" in the text, from only business organizations.

If you find it difficult it is better to outsource data mining to companies like Online Web Research Services



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Understanding-Data-Mining&id=5608012

The Benefits of Data Mining

Data mining can truly help a business reach its fullest potential. It is a way to assess how business is being affected by certain characteristics, and can help business owners increase their profits and avoid making business mistakes down the line. Essentially, through this process, a business is analyzing certain data from different perspectives in order to get a full rounded view of how their company is doing. Business owners can get a broad perspective on things such as customer trending, where they are losing money and where they are making money. The information can also reveal ways that can help a business cut unneeded costs and can help them increase their overall income.

Data mining software is one tool that can help a company assess and analyze their data in more efficient terms. It can be extremely user friendly and allow people to delve into their data from a variety of different angles and points of view. In more technical terms, data mining software allows you to see the correlations and patterns of one's own data compared with those across many other regional databases.

People have been using data mining for many years in different formats. Only since the technology has become available has data software been used. But there have been many ways in the past for companies to assess their data and use it to their advantage. By taking polls, or using store scanners, product codes and bar codes, people have been able to gather data, analyze it and use it to their advantage. But it cannot be denied that the availability of greater technology has greatly increased the ability to store or gather data, make predictions about outcomes and use customer trend reports to greater advantages. The ability to store infinite amounts of data has given business owners a great advantage and truly has helped increase sales and lower costs. This data mining has actually led to data being stored in data warehouses. In data warehouses, various organizations will integrate their mined data into one large data warehouse. The information accessible in data warehouses is available to further help companies reduce risk taking and integrate proper selling techniques to improve business.

Data mining also can allow companies to see where their best selling points are and give them the opportunity to take advantage of this information. For example, if a pharmacy places a display of lip balm at the cashier counter, data mining can detect how many people bought lip balm from the cashier counter rather people who bought the lip balm when it was placed at another point in the store. Data mining can determine where the most effective points of sale are throughout a store or if a certain promotion went well one time of the month, but did not go well at another time of the month. Companies can make offers based on the buying habits of their customers as well.

Data mining can truly help businesses reach their highest profitability by paying attention to customer trending.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Benefits-of-Data-Mining&id=4565509

Monday, 9 September 2013

Data Mining Process - Why Outsource Data Mining Service?

Overview of Data Mining and Process:
Data mining is one of the unique techniques for investigating information to extract certain data patterns and decide to outcome of existing requirements. Data mining is widely use in client research, services analysis, market research and so on. It is totally based on mathematical algorithm and analytical skills to drive the desired results from the huge database collection.

Information mining is mostly used by financial analyzer, business and professional organization and also there are many growing area of business that are get maximum advantages of data extract with use of data warehouses in their small to large level of businesses.

Most of functionalities which are used in information collecting process define as under:

* Retrieving Data

* Analyzing Data

* Extracting Data

* Transforming Data

* Loading Data

* Managing Databases

Most of small, medium and large levels of businesses are collect huge amount of data or information for analysis and research to develop business. Such kind of large amount will help and makes it much important whenever information or data required.

Why Outsource Data Online Mining Service?

Outsourcing advantages of data mining services:
o Almost save 60% operating cost
o High quality analysis processes ensuring accuracy levels of almost 99.98%
o Guaranteed risk free outsourcing experience ensured by inflexible information security policies and practices
o Get your project done within a quick turnaround time
o You can measure highly skilled and expertise by taking benefits of Free Trial Program.
o Get the gathered information presented in a simple and easy to access format

Thus, data or information mining is very important part of the web research services and it is most useful process. By outsource data extraction and mining service; you can concentrate on your co relative business and growing fast as you desire.

Outsourcing web research is trusted and well known Internet Market research organization having years of experience in BPO (business process outsourcing) field.

If you want to more information about data mining services and related web research services, then contact us.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-Process---Why-Outsource-Data-Mining-Service?&id=3789102

Saturday, 7 September 2013

Data Mining for Dollars

The more you know, the more you're aware you could be saving. And the deeper you dig, the richer the reward.

That's today's data mining capsulation of your realization: awareness of cost-saving options amid logistical obligations.

According to global trade group Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), fewer than 25% of organizations in North America and Europe are currently utilizing captured data as part of their business process. With high ease and low cost associated with utilization of their information, this unawareness is shocking. And costly.

Shippers - you're in prime position to benefit the most by data mining and assessing your electronically-captured billing records, by utilizing a freight bill processing provider, to realize and receive significant savings.

Whatever your volume, the more you know about your transportation options, throughout all modes, the easier it is to ship smarter and save. A freight bill processor is able to offer insight capable of saving you 5% - 15% annually on your transportation expenditures.

The University of California - Los Angeles states that data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - knowledge that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining software is an analytical tool that allows investigation of data from many different dimensions, categorize it, and summarize the relationships identified. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations among dozens of fields in large relational databases. Practically, it leads you to noticeable shipping savings.

Data mining and subsequent reporting of shipping activity will yield discovery of timely, actionable information that empowers you to make the best logistics decisions based on carrier options, along with associated routes, rates and fees. This function also provides a deeper understanding of trends, opportunities, weaknesses and threats. Exploration of pertinent data, in any combination over any time period, enables you the operational and financial view of your functional flow, ultimately providing you significant cost savings.

With data mining, you can create a report based on a radius from a ship point, or identify opportunities for service or modal shifts, providing insight regarding carrier usage by lane, volume, average cost per pound, shipment size and service type. Performance can be measured based on overall shipping expenditures, variances from trends in costs, volumes and accessorial charges.

The easiest way to get into data mining of your transportation information is to form an alliance with a freight bill processor that provides this independent analytical tool, and utilize their unbiased technologies and related abilities to make shipping decisions that'll enable you to ship smarter and save.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-for-Dollars&id=7061178

Thursday, 5 September 2013

Data Entry - Why Are Data Entry Services So Cheap?

Data entry has become a requirement these days for a lot of company that need to have their physical data input in order to make digital files out of them. This is turn makes the documents more manageable and accessible and saves a lot of time and space whilst improving efficiency. So how can companies that offer data entry charge such a low rate for the services?

Well it can all depend on the type of data that is being input. For example, if the data that needs making digital is already from a document which has been typed and printed or typed using a typewriter then sophisticated software can be used in order to extract the data quickly and simply. This means that because the process is automated, this saves a lot of time and man power. Often this software will have been developed in-house or especially for the company themselves.

If the data is handwritten then it will need to be input manually, and this is where things can get a little more expensive. But amazingly, not by much. Data entry has become increasingly cheap over the last few years and the main reason for this is outsourcing. A lot of companies, whether admitting it or not, may be outsourcing the work to the east where the work can be done at that same level or quality for significantly less. A lot of companies are fine with admitting this, but others are not so sure, primarily because this may put people off the service. However in our experience, the data capture staff that we have used have excellent English skills and offer work done to a similar level to that of an English-language based company.

If you're not sure you like the idea of this and are looking at getting data entry or data capture completed, ask the company where they have their data captured from. Most companies will be honest and tell you, but it's usually fairly obvious by the rate that they charge for the data entry itself. Ask how long they have worked with the data capturing company for and also make sure to request a sample of their work and perhaps the data entry company will be willing to get a sample made especially for you. But make sure to look for companies which have secured the ISO 9001:2000 as this ensures that work is checked over by a third-party to ensure quality.

Steve Wright is marketing manager with Pearl Scan solutions a document scanning and data entry company from the UK. We offer top quality data entry services for our clients with a 98% accuracy rating. Ask us about our data entry staff if you'd like to know more and we'd be happy to tell you more.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry---Why-Are-Data-Entry-Services-So-Cheap?&id=6193944

How Data Mining is Useful to Companies?

Every business, organization and government bodies are collecting large amount of data for research and development. Such huge database can make them to have the information on hand when required. But most important is that it takes much time to find important information from the data. "If you want to grow rapidly, you must take quick and accurate decisions to grab timely available opportunities."

By applying the process of data mining, you can easily extract and filter required information from data. It is a processing of refining data and extracting important information. This process is mainly divided into 3 sections; pre-processing, mining and validation. In pre-processing, large amount of relevant data are collected. The mining section includes data classification, clustering, error correction and linking information. The last but important is validate without which you can not make trust on information. In short, data mining is a process of converting data into authentic information.

Let's have look on how data mining is useful to companies.

Fast and Feasible Decisions: To search information from huge bundle of data require more time. It also irritates a person who is doing such. With annoyed mind one can not take accurate decisions that's for sure. By having help of data mining, one can easily get information and make fast decisions. It also helps to compare information with various factors so the decisions become more reliable. Data mining is helpful in every decision to make it quick and feasible.

Powerful Strategies: After data mining, information becomes precise and easy to understand. While making strategies, one can easily analyze information in various dimensions. This analysis helps to get real idea about the strategy implementation. Management bodies can implement powerful strategies effectively to expand business boundaries.

Competitive Advantage: Information is easily available and precise so that one can compare it with competitors' information. It is very much required that you must compare the data otherwise you will have to suffer in business. After doing competitive analysis, one can make corrective decisions to go ahead from competitors. This way company can gain competitive advantage.

Your business can get all the benefits of data mining at cutting rates through outsourcing.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Data-Mining-is-Useful-to-Companies?&id=2835042

Wednesday, 4 September 2013

Outsource Data Entry - A Wise Business Decision

Getting the benefits of outsourcing data entry services for your business will be a wise choice. Many offshore companies guarantee quick and accurate data entry services. These companies offer data entry services from industry expert professionals and flexibility as per user requirements. All recent reports say, trend of outsourcing low priority work will continue to grow gradually.

In earlier days, outsourcing was thought as a temporary option of meeting particular objective, is now becoming the best industry option. Viewed as a temporary business solution, outsourcing is now a strategically important business decision. Outsourcing your services will reduce your costs with improved services.

Advantages of Data Entry Outsourcing

Data entry outsourcing gives you many business advantages include:

- By outsourcing one can easily concentrate on core business competencies and goals.
- In these cut throat competitive time, outsourcing is a cautious way of controlling expensive staffing cost. Person can get outsourcing services on per transaction basis, which ease the hurdles of having the possibility of firing staff members.
- By outsourcing you can get the advantage of economies of scale. If you work with an outsourcing company you will save your valuable money, probably boost your operational efficiency.
- By outsourcing your data-entry work your cost will be on per transaction basis which will allow you to easily predict your budget and give you the best budget planning.
- By outsourcing organizations do not have to worry about meeting time lines. As many outsourcing companies guarantee of in-time delivery which was already specified in user agreement and will not be longer concern to worry.
- Most of the outsourcing companies located in cheap offshore countries like India, Indonesia etc and having expertise of handling data entry operations.

Thus by outsourcing data-entry work organizations can get advantage in terms of time, money and efficiency which will obviously increase business productivity.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsource-Data-Entry---A-Wise-Business-Decision&id=2694032

Tuesday, 3 September 2013

Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:
• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection
Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:
• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction-Services-and-Data-Collection-Form-Website-Pages&id=4860417

Sunday, 1 September 2013

Data Mining, Not Just a Method But a Technique

Web data mining is segregating probable clients out of huge information available on the Internet by performing various searches. It could be well organized and structured, or raw, depending on the use of the data. Web data mining could be done using a simple database program or investing money in a costly program.

Start collecting basic contact information of probable clients, such as: names, addresses, landline and cell phone numbers, email addresses and education or occupation if required.

CART and CHAID data mining

While collecting data you will find that tree-shaped structures that represent decisions. These derived decisions give rules for the classification of data collected. Precise decision tree methods include Classification and Regression Trees also know as CART data mining and Chi Square Automatic Interaction Detection also known as CHAID data mining. CART and CHAID data mining are decision tree techniques used for classification of data collected. They provide a set of rules that could be applied to unclassified data collected in prediction. CART segments a dataset creating two-way splits whereas CHAID segments using chi square tests creating multi-way splits. CART requires less data preparation compared to CHAID.

Understanding customer's actions

Keep a track of customer's actions like: what does he buy, when does he buy, why does he buy, what is the use of his buying, etc. Knowing such simple things about your customer will help you to understand needs of your customer better and thus process of data mining services will be easier and quality data would be mined. This will increase your personal relations with your customer which would finally result in a better professional relationship.

Following demography

Mine the data as per demography, dependent on geography as well as socio economic background of business location. You can use government statistics as the source of your data collection. Keeping it in mind you can go ahead with the understanding of the community existing and thus the data required.

Use your informal conversation in serving your clients better

Use minute details of your conversation and understanding with your customers to serve them. If essential, conduct surveys, send a professional gift or use some other object that helps you understand better in fulfilling customer needs. This will increase the bonding between you and your customer and you will be able to serve your customer better in providing data mining services.

Insert the collect information in a desktop database. More the information is collected you will find that you can prepare specific templates in feeding information. Using a desktop database, it is easier to make changes later on as and when required.

Maintaining privacy

While performing, it is essential to ensure that you or your team members are not violating privacy laws in gathering or providing the data information. Once trust is lost, you may also loose the customer, because trust is the base of any relationship, let it be a business relation.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining,-Not-Just-a-Method-But-a-Technique&id=5416129