What is Web Scraping? | Practical Uses and Methods
Data displayed on websites can only be viewed using a web browser. Most sites do not allow you to save or download this data. If you need the data, the only option is to manually copy and paste it — a very tedious task that can take many hours or days. Web scraping is a technology that automates this process, where instead of manually copying data from websites, a web scraping program performs the same task in a fraction of the time.
Web scraping software automatically downloads, crawls, and extracts data from multiple pages of websites according to your requirements. It is either built specifically for a particular site or can be configured to search for data from any site. With the click of a button, you can easily save the data displayed by websites to a file on your computer.
What is Web Scraping Used For?
Web scraping is used to obtain data. Access to relevant data, having methods to analyze it, and performing intelligent actions based on that analysis can make a huge difference for the success and growth of most businesses in the modern world. Data collection and analysis are important even for government, non-profit, and educational institutions.
Below are some of the many applications of web scraping:
- In e-commerce, web scraping is used to monitor competitor prices.
- In marketing, web scraping is used for lead generation, creating lists of phone numbers and email addresses for cold outreach.
- In real estate, web scraping is used to obtain information about properties and agents/owners.
- Web scraping is used to collect training and test data for machine learning projects.
Is Web Scraping Legal ?
One of the most common questions that comes to mind after you decide to engage in data collection is whether the web scraping process is legal. Scraping data that is already publicly available is legal provided that you use that data ethically. If websites want to prevent scraping, they can use methods such as CAPTCHA forms and IP blocking. Web scraping software can help you collect data anonymously by using proxies or VPNs.
How to Scrape Data from Websites?
1. Using Web Scraping Software
Web scraping programs fall into two categories. The first are programs that can be installed locally on your computer, and the second are cloud-based (browser-based) programs.
2. Writing Code or Hiring a Developer
You can hire a developer to create specialized data extraction software according to your requirements. The developer, in turn, can use APIs or web scraping libraries. For example, apify.com allows you to easily get an API for scraping data from any site. Beautiful Soup is a Python library that allows you to extract data from the HTML code underlying web pages.
Web Scraping Doesn't Have to Be Complicated
The problem with most universal web scraping programs is that they are very difficult to learn and use. You have to go through a steep learning curve.