Web Scraping vs Screen Scraping: Techniques and Applications

The main methods of data extraction are web scraping and screen scraping. They differ in the type of data collected and the methods used to collect that open data.

However, the terms web scraping and screen scraping often overlap. Depending on the data type, you will need one or another data collection tool. Understanding the differences between these terms is very important for choosing the appropriate data collection tool according to your business needs and usage conditions.

This article explains the differences between web scraping and screen scraping in terms of use cases and methods used for data extraction.

What is Screen Scraping?

Screen scraping is the process of collecting and extracting visual data from a screen, such as from an application, web page, documents, PDF files, or other web sources. Screen data can be collected automatically or manually from digital screens.

The extracted visual data is displayed or used in another application or system for various business purposes. Three scraping methods are used to collect data from application screens, documents, and information systems.

Screen Scraping Methods

1. FullText: The FullText screen scraping method allows extracting hidden text data from a given user interface (UI) element or document.
2. Native: Unlike FullText and OCR, when using native screen scraping methods, the user can only extract data from applications. The native scraping method allows extracting screen coordinates of each word on the screen. It does not allow extracting hidden text.
3. OCR (Optical Character Recognition): The OCR method allows extracting data from visual sources, desktop applications, and Citrix applications. Various OCR engines such as Google OCR and Microsoft OCR are used to extract screen coordinates of each word from an image.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the extraction of publicly available web data from various web sources using parser bots. The obtained data is transformed into a readable and unique format (so-called data parsing), making it easier to work with and extract useful information from it.

How Does Screen Scraping Work?

Screen scraping can be applied once or at scheduled intervals. A typical screen scraping process consists of the following steps:

• Navigating and identifying specific user interface (UI) elements.
• Extracting on-screen data from the user interface.
• The data extracted from the legacy system is transformed into a more modern system or application to be properly displayed on user screens.
• Screen scraping is used to extract unstructured data. To facilitate machine perception of visual input, optical character recognition (OCR) is used during scraping to convert unstructured data into a machine-readable format.

How Does Web Scraping Work?

1. Identifying the target website URL.
2. The web scraper makes a request to connect to the target website.
3. If the website uses anti-scraping measures, a proxy server must be integrated into the bot to hide its real IP address and prevent bot detection on the target site.
4. The website responds to the request and provides access to the site content.
5. The web scraping bot browses the web pages and retrieves the HTML files of the web pages.
6. Parsing the unformatted HTML data into a structured format.
7. The obtained data is saved in the desired format, such as JSON or CSV.

What is Screen Scraping Used For?
1. Finance

Screen scraping is used to collect client financial data and financial data operations between banks and third-party providers (TPPs). Screen scraping allows TPPs to access client financial data, such as transaction history and application login credentials, with their permission.

For example, when a client makes an online purchase on an e-commerce site, the site's third-party payment processor requests their banking application login credentials. After that, the TPP will gain secured access to the client's bank accounts and initiate a payment on their behalf.

2. Marketing

Scraping allows companies to track product reviews and prices, and verify that advertisements are displayed on the right platforms.

• Review Monitoring: Customers express their thoughts and opinions about a product or service using emojis, GIFs, images, and videos. Suppose you want to buy a leather jacket. Customers often share their product reviews accompanied by images to show how much they liked or disliked the product. Instead of just looking at the jacket on the product page, you would want to read customer reviews under that product to get a more realistic impression. Product images help understand and decide if the jacket fits you well before purchasing. Screen scraping allows companies to collect product review data from various web sources to understand their customers' needs and pain points.
• Ad Verification: Marketing teams and advertising agencies use scraping to verify ads, ensuring that campaigns appear in the right place, in the right language, for the right audience. This also allows marketing teams to:
  • Ensure that ads are viewable on various platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
  • Verify that ads are displayed on a secure platform to ensure brand safety and reputation.
• Price Monitoring: Scraping tools automate the extraction of publicly available financial data, including stock market data, inventory data, and news from various web sources such as Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, Investopedia, and Bloomberg. It extracts historical financial data and tracks price changes on volume charts for data-driven market forecasting.
• E-Commerce: Companies conduct competitor analysis in various ways, including monitoring competitors' social media accounts, analyzing their pricing strategies, and monitoring their customer reviews. Another method of competitor market analysis is displaying products in a manner suitable for website visitors. Screen scraping allows companies to scrape competitor product pages to understand how competitors promote their products on category sites. This also allows companies to:
  • Personalize and optimize category pages based on customer preferences. For example, if visitors are most interested in and attracted to payment or delivery options, then product pages can prioritize these details.
  • Display product overview, name, price, and features in the correct hierarchy.

3. Quality Assurance

Companies use screen scraping technology to check the quality of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) on their websites. Screen scraping allows developers and test automation engineers to ensure that the appearance and functionality of websites work properly.

Screen scraping tools extract graphical user interface (GUI) elements from a website, such as menus, buttons, icons, etc., to determine whether the website's functionality and design structure or application are working as required.

What is Web Scraping Used For?

Web scraping is used in various industries such as travel, finance, and real estate for various purposes including review monitoring, collecting product data from e-commerce sites like Amazon, social media monitoring, lead generation, and more.

Web Scraping vs Screen Scraping: Which is Better for Your Needs?

The main difference between web scraping and screen scraping lies in the type of data extracted. A screen scraping tool captures and extracts on-screen and text data from websites and documents. In contrast, a web scraping tool extracts data from websites, including text, images, videos, and URLs.