There is a good chance that you have heard of website scraping before, even if you do not have much experience with website content and data management. At its core, web scraping is an automated copy-and-paste that helps copy data from one site to another – but how and why?
What is Website Scraping?
In simple terms, website scraping is data extraction from a targeted website. You ” scrape” the data off the platform like you might scrape frosting from a cake and then transfer it to another place to store it, re-use it, research it, etc.
This is basically a way of taking a large amount of data and storing it somewhere else. Manual scraping involves personally copying and pasting all the data you want, which is why modern web scraping uses various tools to copy that information automatically.
How Does Web Scraping Work?
Web scraping involves using tools or scripts to automatically visit websites, retrieve specific data, and then store that data in a structured format like CSV or JSON. The process can be broken down into a few basic steps:
- Access the Website: A web scraper visits the website from which data needs to be extracted.
- Extract Data: The scraper identifies and collects the data points specified by the user. This could include text, images, links, or other information.
- Store Data: The scraped data is then saved in a format that can be easily accessed and used later, such as a JSON file or a database.
While this might sound simple, the process can get incredibly complicated, especially since the data usually will not be sitting in a well-formatted spreadsheet or left available for anybody to take. Scrapers often work alongside crawlers – bots that visit the sites and index each page to locate the information in the first place.
Many websites also have systems to block bots from accessing their pages, which means that scrapers usually need proxies or other IP disguisers to scrape reliably. On top of that, every tool involved in the scraping process might have different limitations and restrictions, and most sites are going to have unique code and layouts that need to be scraped in a bespoke way.
Several tools and libraries can help you perform web scraping effectively. For example, Selenium allows browsers to be automated to deal with dynamic elements like a Captcha check or data collection pop-up. In contrast, BeautifulSoup can handle data extraction using the Python coding language.
The Benefits of Web Scraping
When you understand how powerful and effective web scraping is, it is easier to see why many companies use it in their data collection and management processes.
For a start, it is an incredibly fast process, with many tools and programs able to complete tasks that would take weeks to do manually. On top of that, scraping can gather far more data than any person could ever hope to copy and paste manually.
If you want to know more about web scraping and how it functions, then there are plenty of resources out there for scraping as a whole. Alongside that are a lot of guides to Python, Puppeteer, JSON, Selenium, and the many tools that scrapers use to get the data they need.
