Web Scraping Explained | The Definitive Guide to Extracting Data from the Web

7 months ago | data

Web Scraping is the process of extracting and importing data from a website into a spreadsheet, a database, or a local file saved on your computer. It is the most efficient way to get the consolidated data from a website or a number of websites to research, analyse or to use in legal way

 

What is Web Scraping?

Web Scraping is the process of extracting and importing data from a website into a spreadsheet, a database, or a local file saved on your computer. It is the most efficient way to get the consolidated data from a website or a number of websites to research, analyse or to use in legal way.

What are the popular uses of scraped data?

Web Scraper bots can be designed for many purposes, such as:

  1. Content Scraping
  2. Business intelligence
  3. Price Scraping Price comparisons
  4. Contacts Scraping Sales leads
  5. Copy products data from an ecommerce website to another vendors platform

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What are the alternate names used for the web scraping?

Following names are used as an alternate for the web scraping:

  1. Data Scraping
  2. Data Extraction
  3. Web Data Extraction
  4. Web Harvesting
  5. Screen Scraping
 

Different ways to mitigate web scraping:

Web admin can use various way to stop or limit a scraper bot, such as:

  1. Limit the Request Rate
  2. Use captchas to avoid the high volume requests
  3. Regular HTML mark-up modifications
  4. Presenting the contact information in terms of images
  5. Blocking the IP’s with the high request rates
 

What is the difference between data crawling and data scraping?

Data crawling refers to the process where search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. send their crawlers to the website to read and index their web content. Scraping on the other side, focus on extracting the data from a particular website.

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