Web Scraping is the process of automatically collecting data from websites. This process involves reading the content (text, images, links, etc.) of a web page using software or bots, and converting it into a dataset.
How It Works:
- A bot or software sends an HTTP request to the target website.
- The page’s HTML structure is parsed to identify the required data.
- The data is extracted and typically saved into a database, table, or file. During this process, the desired data is selected using HTML tags, CSS classes, or API responses.
Use Cases:
- Price comparison websites
- Analyzing news or blog content
- Collecting e-commerce product information
- Creating datasets for data science projects
- SEO analysis and competitor tracking tools
- Academic research and market analysis
Considerations:
- Not every website may allow scraping.
- Websites’ robots.txt file may define scraping policies.
- Excessive or unauthorized scraping can lead to legal issues.
- If a website offers an API, it is preferable to use the API instead of scraping.