The article discusses the challenge of identifying top candidates for a business proposal based on website quality scores, aiming to automate the process with machine learning pipelines.
It covers technical implementations like fetching HTML content in Python using Snowflake dataset or CSV, and assigning a quality score using PySpark for feature extraction and processing.
Legal and ethical considerations in web scraping are highlighted, emphasizing responsible practices, retention policies, and potential permissions from site owners.
The article provides instructions on getting started with the project, including the folder structure, Snowflake data preparation, and usage of scripts for fetching website content.
Advantages of using a comprehensive fetching script over a basic approach are outlined, showcasing benefits like asynchronous requests, rotating User-Agents, and efficient batching.
Storing raw HTML in databases like Snowflake is recommended for scalability, as large-scale scraping and feature engineering are more reliable when done in a suitable data warehouse.
The process of extracting features from HTML content using PySpark via Snowpark is detailed, including creating UDFs, applying feature extraction functions, and generating quality scores.
Country-specific configurations are utilized for defining keywords and patterns that signal good merchant sites, making the feature extraction adaptable across different regions.
The article concludes by emphasizing the website quality score as a key input for predictive models, showcasing its significance in ranking and recommending partners effectively for better business outcomes.
A GitHub repository link is provided for the implementation details and a disclaimer clarifies that the data and scripts used are examples and not from real business scenarios.