From research studies to product listings, the internet is a treasure trove of informative content and valuable data.
Scanning through the billions of websites to find accurate data can be a herculean effort. With data extraction software, you can now automate how you collect or extract data from the web. The process of using bots to extract data and content from websites is known as web scraping. You can also work with data extraction services providers with web scraping services capabilities for automating data scraping.
Web scraping, also known as web harvesting or web data extraction, is an automated process of extracting data from websites.
Web scraping collects and converts unstructured data in hypertext markup language (HTML) format into structured data, which can either be in a spreadsheet or database. Then, you can manipulate or analyze the data for fueling business applications.
Want to learn more about web scraping and its implications for your business? Continue reading the rest of the article to explore techniques, tools, and legal considerations!
To grasp web scraping, it’s important first to understand that web pages are built with text-based markup languages.
A markup language defines the structure of a website’s content. Since there are universal components and tags of mark-up languages, this makes it much easier for web scrapers to pull the information they need. Parsing through HTML is only one-half of web scraping. After that, the scraper then extracts the necessary data and stores it. Web scrapers are similar to application programming interfaces (APIs) which allow two applications to interact with one another to access data.
Check out the step-by-step process of how web scrapers function.
Too many HTTP requests from scrapers can crash a website, so websites have different rules for bots to follow.
Follow the steps below to carry out web scraping.
Web crawling and web scraping are two techniques for collecting data from the Internet, but they serve different purposes and operate in distinct ways.
Web crawling involves systematically browsing the internet to index content from various websites. Web crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, are designed to navigate through links on web pages and gather data for search engines like Google, which then index the content to improve search results.
Web scraping, on the other hand, is the process of extracting specific information from websites. Unlike crawlers, which collect general data for indexing, scrapers target particular data, such as prices, reviews, or contact information. Web scraping tools are used to automate this extraction process, allowing users to gather and organize data for analysis or use in other applications.
Legal rules restrict what you can scrape, but businesses usually extract the following types of data from websites.
Below are some of the common web scraping techniques.
Depending on the ease of use and the tech behind them, web scrapers can be of five types.
Below are a few examples of how different industries use web scraping.
You may or may not be aware of it, but somewhere on the web, there’s a good chance your phone number or email address could be extracted. In web scraping, this is called contact extraction. Sales intelligence tools crawl the public web and scrape what they believe to be the correct email address and any available phone numbers. While the information may not be 100 percent accurate, it still makes cold email outreach more efficient.
If you’re a “low-price hawk”, you must have interacted with a price comparison tool at some point in the past. By price scraping e-commerce product or service websites, there are tools that are able to offer real-time price comparisons and fluctuations.
Similar to price comparison tools, you can also scrape the web to extract coupons and promo codes. While the success of these tools varies (and companies get more clever with their promo offerings), it’s still worth seeing if you can save money before checking out.
One of the more lucrative ways to apply web scraping is to use it for search engine optimization (SEO) auditing. Basically, search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing Web Search API have hundreds of guidelines when it comes to ranking search results for keywords – some carry more value than others.
SEO software scrapes the web, amongst other things, to analyze and compare content on search engines in terms of SEO strength. Marketers then use this insight and apply it to their day-to-day content strategies.
More advanced uses of web scraping are actually able to monitor data feeds. Businesses use social listening tools to scrape and extract real-time data feeds from social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. You can use this information to examine quantitative metrics like subscribers’ comments, mentions, retweets, etc., and also qualitative metrics like brand sentiment and topic affinity.
Website owners use completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart (CAPTCHA) as an anti-scraping measure to prevent bots from accessing their websites. Below are the common ways to solve CAPTCHA.
Web scraping is not a perfect, by-the-books process. Here are some limitations you can face while scraping the web.
Check out the website's "robots.txt" to know if they allow web scraping. You can easily locate this file by typing in “/robots.txt” at the end of the website URL. If you're looking to scrape the Amazon website, you can look at the www.amazon.com/robots.txt file. Now, look at the ‘allow’ and ‘disallow’ paths to understand what a website spider may or may not let you access from the page source for a scraping project.
Data extraction platforms help you retrieve unstructured, poorly structured, and structured web data for data analysis or business intelligence needs. These tools work in tandem with data quality software and data preparation tools to help you organize and clean data. Businesses also use data extraction tools in conjunction with data integration platforms to gather different data types and sources in one place.
In 2024, businesses increasingly rely on efficient data extraction tools to gather valuable insights from websites and online sources. Web scraping capabilities are essential for automating data collection from various platforms.
Here's a list of the top solutions:
*These are the top 5 data extraction software from G2’s Fall 2024 Grid® Report.
Once you scrape and gather data from the web, you need to analyze it for insights. These data insights help you discover new opportunities for business growth. Even though the data is accessible, the challenge lies in figuring out the proper way to analyze and apply it.
Dive into data analysis and unlock a variety of insights from the data you scrape.
This article was originally published in 2019. It has been updated with new information.