ChatGPT has been firing on the internet since its launch. It took only a week to acquire about one million active users. In a month, it reached over 57 million users. It is among the popular chatbots that got a record-breaking user base and attention. Though it is popular among users, it creates a concern for job security in many industries.
We have observed similar discussions about whether ChatGPT will replace web scraping tools and services. A few questions and discussions are already going on on various social media platforms and forums, like the impact of ChatGPT on e-commerce web scraping.
How will ChatGPT affect e-commerce data extraction? Will it eliminate the requirement for e-commerce web scraping services? To answer it, we should know what ChatGPT is, how it works, and how it helps in web scraping.
What is ChatGPT?
It is an artificial intelligence-based language model. If you ask how to address it? It will tell you to call it AI or ChatGPT. Chatting with it feels like talking with a natural person, but it says I don't have personal emotions or priorities.
OpenAI developed this famous chatbot about the GPT 3 model, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3. It can generate text that humans can write or speak using the state-of-the-art language processing model for artificial intelligence. OpenAI has inputted the tool words worth 570 GB of articles, books, Wikipedia posts, and more for the functioning and improvement of the model.
Each user may find it valuable for their daily routine and job. It can help write blogs, ad copies, scripts, and ebooks, explain and debug codes, and even help prepare job interviews. The development team has trained the model superbly to make it successful.
It can also suggest personal development, communication, and how to improve. We tried it for the same in an instance. One of our team members wanted to buy a house last month, but there was another buyer for the same house. So he asked the ChatGPT how to ask the seller about the home politely. And it answered how to respond to the buyer.
If you want to write a script for a film or a fiction, and you don't know, you can ask ChatGPT to create it. It will need some details to generate the script; you can give it details with accurate prompts. However, it may give you poor quality, a significant drawback. One of the articles suggests the audience treat ChatGPT as a toy because it writes fundamental content instead of quality.
What will be the impact of ChatGPT on web scraping tools and services?
Like writing, the tool shows strengths and drawbacks in web data scraping. The strength is it can advise you for scraping the data. But regarding drawbacks, you can depend on ChatGPT to scrape customized data.
The typical use of this tool for web scraping is asking it to give you a code. The code will also give the link to the target page of the source website. Once you give the prompt, it will take a few seconds and reply with the required code that you can copy and paste to execute. Further, it will suggest the library you can use to scrape the required data. As the tool gives you code, it saves you time and workforce. A person shared how ChatGPT affects web scraping in social media: He posted that using ChatGPT for web scraping would reduce the time of searching on Google during the process, but it was not significant.
We tried an experiment to ask ChatGPT to scrape ecommerce product data from a website. But it replied with a negative answer. It said it could only suggest processes, being an AI model, but can't scrape data directly.
Data Scraping Tools are Still Irreplaceable
As per the ChatGPT, it only offers advice for web scraping. Hence, discussing its role in web scraping could be a better use of time.
In the initial stage of the internet, it was necessary to have coding skills to scrape data from specific websites. But it is not the case now because of the availability of web scraping tools and services. People don't need to spend time searching on Google to research the web scraping process; they don't need to ask ChatGPT or explore code examples.
There are many options on the internet to scrape data. All of them are user-friendly and help to improve productivity in offices. For example, Product Data Scrape allows users to scrape ecommerce product data using scrapers and provides customized e-commerce data extraction services depending on requirements. Here are a few steps to scrape data using our scraper.
Step A: Create New Project
Open our tool for web scraping on your device. Then, enter the link to the target page into the Product Data Scrape search bar. After that, our browser will start loading the page.
Step B: Choose the Required Data
Once you see a page, go to the Tips panel, and click the option to detect data automatically. Our tool will scan the webpage and highlight the data you can collect. You can find whether you see the required data on the screen. If not, you can eliminate the unnecessary data.
You don't need to know HTML or XML document formats. But you should have enough knowledge to test these docs using Python libraries. Even though you generate code for web scraping using AI tools like ChatGPT, you should go through it and verify whether it meets your needs and has accuracy. We're saying this because some users shared their experiences with the inaccuracy and mistakes of ChatGPT in coding.
Step C: Make Web Scraping Workflow
Once you choose the required data fields on the tool, click the option to create a workflow for web scraping. You'll see the workflow on the right side of your screen. It is a flowchart to explain all the steps of the scraper. You can explore all these actions and how they work and make necessary changes.
Step D: Execute the Project and Export the Data
Once you finish the data verification, click the Run button and start scraping. There are two alternatives to execute the project. One is to run it on your device, and the second is on our cloud servers. If you opt to run the project using our cloud server, it will continue to operate even though you turn off the device or change it.
After completing the project, you can download the data in JSON, CSV, or Google Sheets files.
Is it tough to understand? To try our scraping tool, you can visit our website and download it on your device. If you don't have an account on our platform, you can register or contact us to fulfill your data scraping needs.
Use Product Data Scrape Effectively with ChatGPT
Though the AI tool ChatGPT said it couldn't scrape any data, you can still leverage it to get an idea and generate code for web scraping while using our web scraping tool. You might experience these examples while extracting website data and how the combination of ChatGPT and the e-commerce web scraping tool of Product Data Scrape can quickly help you collect data.
The Best Option for XPath Tools
You can easily use our auto-detection function. But the complex structure of a few websites will only permit auto-detecting functions to detect some of the required data. Here, the XPath tool will help you discover the correct data points.
Once you find your need and don't know anything about XPath, ChatGPT can help you. Below are the steps to get the XPath using the page for the top 500 gaming laptops under 1000 USD.
- Discover the required page you want to scrape, and copy the link.
- Inform ChatGPT of what factors you need to write XPath for the required page.
- ChatGPT will display output. Copy it.
Being a writing export, ChatGPT writes both absolute and relative XPath and helps you get exact outputs for your data scraping code. Using Xpaths and our web scraping tool, you can get the required data by customizing selected fields. Along with code results, ChatGPT also explains all components of XPath to allow you to understand it better.
A Good Regular Expression Helper
To optimize web scrapers, we have a feature to allow you to try regular expressions. Using a search pattern mentioning character sequences, you can use regular expressions to replace or match elements inside text strings. On our platform, you can use regular expressions to scrape detailed data and filter the collected information by adding prefixes or replacing some content.
Despite the availability of tools to write regular expressions, you may need to understand the basics of regular expressions and HTML documents to generate one. However, if you use ChatGPT for the same, you don't need to know anything about HTML or regular expressions.
Let's take the example of a gaming laptop page again. We got a comprehensive answer using this chatbot. It shared valuable regular expressions with detailed descriptions of every component.
Additionally, we got an example of a Python application with information on the data format.
Thus, you will not bother to generate regular expressions directly using ChatGPT. Only copy and paste the ChatGPT output code into our scraper, increasing the chance of collecting clean and specific data.
Conclusion
Will ChatGPT replace web scraping? Definitely no! Because we tried to scrape data using it directly, but it rejected it and said that I could only advise you and couldn't scrape data myself. Then we used it to get codes for an idea for one of our ecommerce data collection service projects. Contact Product Data Scrape to learn more.
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