Alexandra Harris
4 Mins
June 2, 2021

Extracting article & news data: The importance of data quality

Article and news data extraction is becoming increasingly popular and widely used by companies.

Data quality plays a vital role in making sure these projects succeed.

If the quality of the extracted articles is not good enough, your whole business could be at risk, especially if it depends on the constant flow of high-quality article data.

Data quality enables your business to move data across your organization and transform it into something valuable for your users or customers. With insufficient or inconsistent data quality, your customers might reevaluate using your product or service, as consistency is something businesses need to acquire and retain customers.

Customers expect to receive high-quality services when it comes to news data.

If your service depends on article data, it means that article extraction directly influences the quality of service your customers get. If you don’t have high extraction quality, your customers won’t get high-quality service, which might make them look for another solution.

Importance of article and news data extraction quality

When it comes to web data extraction, data quality is always a key factor. Without high data quality, organizations face increased costs ($15 million on average per annum according to Gartner) let alone having their competitive standing undermined.  

If you’re looking for an article extraction solution, your top priority should be data quality. You need to know which service or library provides the best article data quality.

news data
News Data and Web Article Extraction

For this, you need to learn what metrics are important when you measure data quality. But also - moving further from general data quality - what measures are important in article extraction and article body extraction quality.

Article body extraction quality is crucial if your business depends on this kind of data. If you’re developing a product or software that needs structured article/news data constantly, you need to make sure you choose a solution that can prove they provide the best quality on the market.

Why companies need article extraction and news data

There are many use cases for article and news data extraction. But one thing is common in each of them: extracting articles from the web gives you a competitive advantage that many companies fail to recognize yet.

News data and web extracted articles can help with the following:

  1. A smarter decision-maker, because you have more information in your hands.
  2. React quicker when speed matters, because you get data close to real-time.
  3. More knowledgeable of your competitors, without lifting a finger.
  4. Deliver world-class solutions, backed by high-quality data.

If you want any of these skills in your arsenal, your top priority should be to choose a solution that has the best article extraction quality on the market.

Brand monitoring, mentions, and sentiment analysis

If you have products sold online, there’s probably a lot of discussion around them as well. People love sharing their good or bad experiences with a product they bought.

These mentions can decide whether future customers buy from you or they choose another brand’s product.

Monitoring your brand online and fueling mentions into your business intelligence can improve the way you market, promote, and present your products online. It can also show you why people are buying (or not buying) your products.

Competitive intelligence, product launches, mergers and acquisitions

In today’s competitive market, every piece of additional information about your competitors and their activities is valuable. 94% of businesses invest in competitive intelligence.

It’s not enough to know your product and customers, you also need to follow your market and your competitors. What they are doing, what they are up to.

Fortunately, there is one thing that still has the power to give you an advantage: data.

Either you’re an investor or just trying to keep track of your competitors, extraction of web articles and news data can work wonders delivering competitive intelligence at scale.

Generating dataset to train machine learning models for NLP

Machine learning models depend on data. The more the better. Luckily, the web offers endless amounts of data. But it’s not just volume that matters. Without high-quality data your algorithm is useless. Bad data quality can cause mistaken analytics, poor decision making, and unreliable predictions. Web data is often incomplete, inconsistent, or inaccurate. And this can be a huge risk for your ML project.

Media personalization, summarization, topic extraction, curation

Nowadays people publish 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day on the web. But not all news is relevant to everyone. That’s why we see more and more applications and websites that specialize in curating and summarizing content for readers, based on their interests. Time is a valuable asset for everybody. Using these article extraction based solutions, people can only spend time on news that actually matters for them.

Business verification and investigation (KYC, KYB)

Whether you are providing KYC (Know-Your-Customer) or KYB (Know-Your-Business) services, or just want to verify a business before engaging in a partnership, getting access in near real-time to related news and articles is important.

With reliable news data, an organization can screen third party's online presence for adverse media coverage, perform more thorough counter-party risk intelligence investigations, and decide based on data-driven insights whether a prospective business partner is genuine, or if there are inherent risks involved in developing or maintaining a business relationship with them. 

Developing a quantitative model for stock selection

News has always played a significant role within the financial market, but more so with the emergence of quantitative or systematic trading. Economic reports, financial reports, or global events can immediately affect the stock market. Thus, in order to make better investing decisions, getting access to articles and news data is essential. With a constant flow of news data, you can improve your quantitative stock selection model.

Want to learn more about article extraction quality?

We are sharing a deep study comparing article body extraction quality provided by commercial services and open source libraries. We evaluated the quality of article body extraction for Zyte Automatic Extraction News API and many other commercial services and open source libraries. If you’re interested to learn more about article extraction quality and want to see the comparison of different services, you can download the whitepaper!