Web Scraping Sailboat Reviews Using Power Query

Quote of the Day

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.

— E.O. Wilson

Figure 1: The Seawind 1600 was a top vote-getter. (Source)

While it is true that I worked on US Navy contracts for twelve years and spent some time on ships testing new underwater vehicles, I know very little about recreational boating. However, I have always been fascinated by sailing, though this fascination has been limited to reading books about the Age of Sail.

Recently, my wife and I have become huge fans of three sailing channels on Youtube that may cause me to take up sailing when I retire (about five years away). Here are my reviews of these three channels:

• Sailing Ruby Rose
  Nick and Terysa and their Southerly 38 monohull sailboat seem to have the most diverse sailing experience. For example, I was utterly fascinated with how they took down their mast, pulled up their keel, and used their sailboat to cruise the canals of France. Their style of presentation is the most journalistic of the three shows in that they matter-of-factly present a large amount of interesting information.
• Gone With the Wynns
  Jason and Nikki Wynn sail the Pacific with their Leopard 43 catamaran sailboat, which they purchased before learning to sail. I could never imagine myself being so bold.  The show is the best produced of the three programs. Nikki is a first-rate narrator and Jason is a professional photographer. His skills really show. The show is beautifully filmed and edited. His use of the drone for aerial shots is superb. These two are fun to watch because you get to see them learning as they go. I am particularly impressed with their worldwide network of helpers.
• The O'Kelly's
  Nick and Megan O'Kelly and their Leopard 46 catamaran sailboat cruise the east coast of the US and the Carribean. Nick is a lifelong sailor and former TV weatherman. He has significant presentation skills and his talks are the most technical in terms of navigation and weather. Since my life is a celebration of detail, I love seeing his explanations of weather and how he plans sailing routes. Megan appears both in their sailing videos and she also has her own video channel where she covers non-sailing topics, like health and sewing. I enjoy this channel as well. I particularly like her sewing projects (my sewing has been limited to a few upholstery projects and a quilt).

Sailboat Survey

The Ruby Rose crew is selling their current boat and did a very interesting analysis of the boats they were considering purchasing as a replacement. Not only did Nick and Terysa review the boats, but they invited their viewers to review the boats.

Here are links to the sailboat review pages. While a good format, I wanted to see all the results in a cross-tabulated table.

Because the data is scattered across nineteen pages, I decided that I needed to do a bit of web scraping using Power Query. You can download my Excel workbook here.

The boats were assigned grades (1-10) in the following categories:

• Performance
• Interior Design
• Build Quality
• Safety and Design
• Value for Money

The final grade was assigned by simply summing the total scores, which implicitly gives each category an equal weight. I wanted my data in a spreadsheet so that I could weight the categories differently. For example, I would like to give Safety and Design and Build Quality more weight than Performance and Interior Design.

Audience Assigned Grades

Table 2 shows the results from their survey of people who watch their channel. Each boat had been the subject of a separate video that allowed their audience to get a good look at each boat.

Table 2: Ruby Rose Sailboat Reviews

Nick and Terysa's Vote

Nick and Terysa also shared the grades they assigned to the boats, which I show in Table 3.

Table 3: Ruby Rose Crew Scoring.