Monitoring for construction project opportunities and leads
from thousands of websites

The Blue Book Building & Construction Network boasts a major online presence and provides digital solutions for simplifying the preconstruction process. BidScope, for example, is an online search engine used by contractors, architects and engineers to search for projects and people for their businesses.

To ensure that BidScope is current and comprehensive, the Blue Book Building & Construction Network finds the latest construction tender opportunities and news, and relies on the Web for public bidding leads. The company chose Connotate to harvest content from thousands of sites and add new sources of news and information daily.

Ken Keeler, manager of data aggregation for the Blue Book, says, “We made a strategic decision to in-source Web scraping versus outsourcing it or off-shoring it, because we own the intellectual property of all the agents, we know where the URLs are and we can fix or add an agent quickly.”

In-sourcing also allows the company to respond much more quickly when it identifies new sources, keeping it ahead of the competition.

According to Connotate, its Web content extraction platform collects information from thousands of sites, and new sites are added all of the time. When researchers identify a new source of information, they immediately build a Connotate agent to harvest content from it. Creating an agent for a new site typically takes an hour or less and is usually done by a non-technical resources.

(Image courtesy of ShutterStock.com)