Web Scraping (or data scraping, screen scraping, web harvesting,or web data extraction) is the process of
extracting data from websites into usable formats or local databases for later analysis or retrieval.
📌Related Reading:
- ➤ Before getting started, check out the pros and cons of web scraping.
- ➤ Check more detailed information about web scraping on Wikipedia.
- ➤ Want to know web scraping quickly? Here are the 5 Findings of Web Scraping.
By downloading and cleaning the data from different web pages, web scraping can turn the unorganized data
into a
structured format, which helps you to reveal insight into statistics and empower decision-making.
With the function of forming custom datasets, turning websites into APIs, achieving effective data management,
etc., web scraping has been widely used in many scenarios. The most common uses of web scraping are:
- For Marketing: Lead Generation, Brand Monitoring, Competitive Monitoring
- For E-commerce & Retail Bussiness: Product Intelligence, Price Intelligence
- For Data Science: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning Training Models
📌Related Reading:
- ➤ The list goes on and on, you can check this article to get inspired by more web scraping use cases.
- ➤ See how you can make the best of web scraping here: 5 Reasons Why Web Scraping May Benefit Your Business.
Web scraping isn’t illegal by itself, yet the problem comes when people use it without the site owner’s
permission
and disregard the ToS (Terms of Service).
To know whether a website allows web scraping or not, you can append “/robots.txt” to the end of the URL of the
website you are targeting and check the details.
Here is an example: https://www.google.com/robots.txt
📌Related Reading:
- ➤ Except for the legal questions, you may also interest in these 10 myths about web scraping.
- ➤ We also make a video for the 10 myths about web scraping, check them now!
Web scraping and web crawling share many similarities, they both refer to data extraction from websites.
But what makes them different is the purpose they serve.
- Web scraping gathers specific data, mainly for later reuse, such as analysis or retrieval. It is widely used for research, gathering real estate listings, price monitoring, web data integration, etc.
- Web Crawling often needs to read and store all of the content on a website for archiving or indexing purposes. Such as search engines use crawlers to index sites.
📌Related Reading:
- ➤ If you want to know who uses data scraping, check this!
- ➤ What Is a Web Crawler and How Does It Work at Your Benefit
Typically, we have 3 ways to scrape data from a website, manually copy-pasting, build a web scraper with coding,
and using a no-code web scraping tool.
- If you don’t know how to code?
If you don’t know how to code, it is easy to go with manually copy and paste.
But no-code web scraping tools, such as Octoparse, are more preferred when
dealing with large
amounts of data, as they can be less costly and work at a faster rate. You can check for the top 30 free
No-code Web Scraping Tools here.
- If you have complex requirements?
When you are facing more complex business requirements and higher technical difficulties, you may need to code
to
solve the problem. Languages such as Python are widely used. Check the beginner’s guide for scrape with
Python
here.
You can both code yourself or outsourcing it. If you are looking for a data service, check out the
Octoparse data service. From crawler setup to data wrangling, to data integration, Octoparse data service offers the
one-complete
solution to take care of all your data needs.
The right data leads to sustainable growth!
Talk to a data expert >>
Octoparse is the ultimate tool for web scraping, which lets you turn the whole internet
into
a structured
format. From detecting to cleaning and downloading, Octoparse offers you a one-stop solution.
It also offers huge resources to help you deal with all the use scenarios. You can check
these a Web Scraping
Case Tutorials to see whether it suits your needs.
- Social media Scraper
- Ecommerce Scraper
- Real estate Scraper
- Education Scraper
- Job Aggregator
- Travel Scraper
Octoparse, Easy Web Scraping for Anyone!
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