What is Parsing?

In today's competitive world, everyone is looking for ways to innovate and leverage new technologies. Scraping (also called website data extraction or data parsing) is an automated process that extracts data from a website and exports it in a structured format.

Scraping is especially useful if the public website you want to get data from doesn't have an API or only provides limited data access.

In this article, we're going to shed light on scraping, and here's what you'll learn:

What is scraping?

Scraping basics

What does the scraping process look like?

What is scraping used for?

Best resources to learn more about scraping

What is Scraping?

Scraping is the process of automatically collecting structured data. It is also widely known as data extraction or web scraping.

Some of the main use cases for scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, market research, and more.

Overall, scraping is used by individuals and businesses who want to leverage publicly available data to gain valuable insights and make effective decisions.

If you've ever copied and pasted information from a website, you've performed the same function as any scraper—only you manually went through the data collection process. Unlike the tedious process of extracting data yourself, scraping uses intelligent automation to extract hundreds, millions, or even billions of data points from the seemingly endless expanses of the internet.

Whether you use a scraper to get data or outsource a scraping project to a data extraction partner, you need to know a bit more about the basics of scraping or web data extraction.

Data Extraction Basics

A parser automates the process of extracting information from other websites quickly and accurately. The extracted data is provided in a structured format, making it easier to analyze and use in your projects. The process is extremely simple and consists of two parts: a crawler and a parser.

The crawler is the horse, and the parser is the chariot.

The crawler leads the parser, as if manually, through the internet, where it extracts the requested data.

Difference Between Scraping and Crawling

Crawler

A crawler, which we usually call a "spider," is an artificial intelligence that browses the internet to index and find content by following links and exploring it. In many projects, you first "crawl" the internet or one specific website to discover URLs that are then passed to your parser.

Parser

A parser is a specialized tool designed to extract data from a web page accurately and quickly. Data scraping tools vary greatly in design and complexity depending on the project.

An important part of every parser is the data locators (or selectors) used to find the data you want to extract from the HTML file—typically XPath, CSS selectors, regex, or a combination of these.

Understanding the difference between a crawler and a parser will help you move forward in implementing web data extraction projects.

The Scraping Process

Scraping can be very useful for obtaining information. There are two ways to get data:

Do it yourself using scraping tools

Here's what the general DIY scraping process looks like:

1. Identify the target website
2. Collect the URLs of the pages from which you want to get data
3. Make a request to those URLs to get the page HTML
4. Use locators to find data in the HTML
5. Save the data in a JSON or CSV file, or in some other structured format.

Simple enough, right? It is! Though, that's only for small projects.

But unfortunately, there are quite a few problems that need to be solved if you need data at scale.

For example, maintaining data extraction tools and parsers when a site’s layout changes, managing proxy servers, executing JavaScript, or dealing with anti-bots. These are all technical problems that consume internal resources to solve.

There are many open-source tools for extracting data from the internet that you can use, but they all have their limitations.

This is one reason why many companies prefer to outsource their data collection projects.

Outsourcing Parsing at ESK Solutions

1. Our team gathers your project requirements.
2. Our team of experienced scraping experts writes parsers and builds infrastructure to collect data and structure it according to your requirements.
3. Finally, we deliver the data in the desired format and frequency.

Ultimately, the flexibility and scalability of scraping ensure that your project’s parameters, regardless of its specifics, can be easily met.

Business analysis managers in e‑commerce inform their retail divisions about competitor prices based on scraping, investors research, evaluate and analyze investment opportunities, and marketing teams overwhelm competitors with deep insights—all thanks to the increasingly widespread adoption of scraping as an integral part of everyday business.

Outsourcing scraping is usually the optimal solution for companies that rely on data understanding.

3 reasons why you should outsource scraping

1. High data quality – data providers like ESK Solutions have modern infrastructure, talented developers, and extensive experience, ensuring no missing or incorrect data.
2. Low cost – getting data from experienced providers can be expensive, but compared to the cost of building your own infrastructure and hiring several developers and engineers, outsourcing is a more cost‑effective option.
3. Legal compliance – you may not know all the permitted and prohibited scraping rules, but a scraping provider with its own legal team certainly does. Outsourcing will ensure you stay compliant with legal regulations.

Want to learn more about how ESK Solutions’ scraping experience can add value to your scraping project? Contact us.

If you still want to try scraping on your own, you need to know about the tools that will help you access data.

What is a scraping tool?

A scraping tool is software designed to extract (or "scrape") relevant data from websites. You will almost certainly use some kind of parser to extract specific data sets when collecting data from websites.

A scraping tool, or parser, is used as part of the scraping process to make HTTP requests to the target website and extract data from the page. It parses the content that is publicly accessible and visible to users and is served by the server as HTML.

Sometimes it also makes requests to internal application programming interfaces (APIs) to retrieve related data – for example, product prices or contact information – that is stored in a database and provided to the browser via HTTP requests.

What is a scraping tool used for?

A scraping tool may be needed to recognize unique HTML structures of sites or to extract, reformat, and store data from APIs.

Scraping tools can be large platforms designed to handle all kinds of typical tasks, but you can also use general-purpose programming libraries and combine them to create a parser.

For example, you can use an HTTP request library - such as the Python Requests library - and combine it with the Python BeautifulSoup library to scrape data from your page. Or you can use a specialized framework that combines an HTTP client with an HTML parsing library.

One popular example is Scrapy, an open-source library designed for advanced scraping needs.

What can you use instead of a scraping tool?

For all but the smallest projects, you will need some automated scraping tool or data extraction software to obtain information from websites.

Theoretically, you could manually cut and paste information from individual web pages into a spreadsheet or another document. But this would be labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error-prone if you are trying to extract information from hundreds or thousands of pages.

Scraping applications and site parsers automate this process, extracting the data you need and formatting it in a structured format for storage and further processing.

Another way to obtain data is to purchase the data you need from a data collection service provider, such as ESK Solutions, which will extract it on your behalf. This would be extremely necessary for large projects involving tens of thousands of web pages.

The Value of Scraping

Scraping provides something truly valuable that nothing else can: it gives you structured data from any public website.

The true power of data scraping lies not only in its modern convenience but also in its ability to create and power some of the most revolutionary business applications in the world.

“Transformation” – that word doesn’t even begin to describe how data obtained through scraping can be used by companies to improve their operations, from executive-level decision-making to personalized customer service.

What is scraping used for?

Price Intelligence

In our experience, price analytics is the biggest application area of scraping.

Extracting product and price information from e-commerce websites and then turning it into actionable intelligence is a key part of modern e-commerce companies that want to make more effective data-driven pricing/marketing decisions.

Alternative Data for Finance

Unlock assets and increase their value with data designed specifically for investors.

The decision-making process has never been more informed, and data has never been more meaningful. It’s no wonder that the world’s leading companies increasingly use data collected from the internet, given its incredible strategic value.

Let’s list such data:

• Extracting information from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents
• Assessing company fundamentals
• Integrating sentiment data from society
• News monitoring

Real Estate

The digital transformation of real estate over the past twenty years threatens to disrupt traditional firms and create new powerful players in the industry.

By incorporating scraping-derived data into daily operations, agents and brokerage firms can protect themselves from online competition and make informed market decisions.

Real estate data

• Property valuation
• Monitoring vacancy rates
• Rental yield assessment
• Understanding market direction

News and Content Monitoring

Modern media can either add value or pose an existential threat to your business within a single news cycle.

If you are a company that relies on timely news analysis, or a company that frequently appears in the news, scraping news data is the optimal solution for monitoring, aggregating, and parsing the most important data in your industry.

• This area includes the following data:
• Investment decision making
• Analysis of public sentiment on the Internet
• Competitor monitoring
• Political campaigns
• Sentiment analysis

Lead Generation

Lead generation is a critical marketing/sales function for all businesses.

In Hubspot's 2023 report, 61% of inbound marketers stated that generating traffic and leads is their number one challenge. Fortunately, data extraction can be used to access structured lead lists from the Internet.

Brand Monitoring

In today's highly competitive market, protecting your online reputation is a top priority.

If you sell your products online and have a strict pricing policy that you need to enforce, or you simply want to know how people perceive your products on the Internet, brand monitoring through web scraping can provide that insight.

Business Automation

In some situations, data access can be difficult. You may need to extract data from a website that you or your partner owns in a structured format. But there is no simple internal way to do it, so it makes sense to create a scraper and simply grab that data, as opposed to trying to navigate complex internal systems.

MAP Monitoring

Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) monitoring is a standard practice to ensure that online prices align with the brand's pricing policy.

With many resellers and distributors, it's impossible to track prices manually.

That's where web scraping comes to the rescue, as you can monitor the prices of your products without any effort.

Other Uses of Internet Data Extraction

The endless methods and applications of data extraction don't stop here. Web scraping is widely used for the following activities:

• News, journalism, and reputation monitoring
• SEO monitoring
• Competitor analysis and risk management
• Data-driven marketing and lead generation
• Real estate, academic research, and much more.

How can I extract data from a website for free?

There are various free data scraping solutions that allow you to automate the process of content scraping and data extraction from the Internet. They range from simple