Web Scraping

Web Scraping or Web Screening is a technique employed by various businesses and companies to extract large amount of data from website and store the extracted data in a local file or in a database for future use. The data extracted can be:

• Product items

• Images

• Videos

• Text

• Contact information like emails, phone numbers, etc.

The users use web browser to browse the data in a website. If the concerned website allows the user to copy the content, the user may save the data if he/she feels use of it. But if the amount of data to copy and paste is very large then it becomes a tedious job for the user to do that. This is where Web Scraping comes into place. Web Scraping technique automates the copy and pasting process in a few minutes (considering the amount of data to be extracted from the website) instead of doing it manually.

There is many web scraping software available in the market to automatically load and extract data from multiple pages of the websites. The web scraping software can also be custom build in order to work for a specific website too.

The web scraping technique has many uses for businesses to monitor and analyze the market every day. Web scraping can also be used to scrape product details like pricing, images, ratings, reviews, comments, etc. Web Scraping can be used in a website where there are constant changes happening frequently.

Web Scraping can also be used in gathering data from multiple sources belonging to a specific category like real estate, automobiles, electronic gadgets, industrial equipment, business contacts, marketing, etc. Web Scraping is also useful for research in gathering structured data from multiple sources in the internet with ease. Some websites don’t allow web scraping as they would have mentioned it in their privacy policy oy legal document. Instead there are legitimate way of doing web scraping by scraping less amount of data from the website in order to reduce load in the website server.