How does scraping work

Web Scraping What is web scraping Web scraping is the process of using bots to extract content and data from a website. Legitimate use cases include: Search engine bots crawling a site, analyzing its content and then ranking it. Price comparison sites deploying bots to auto-fetch prices and product descriptions for allied seller websites.

Market research companies using scrapers to pull data from forums and social media e. Scraper tools and bots Web scraping tools are software i. A variety of bot types are used, many being fully customizable to: Recognize unique HTML site structures Extract and transform content Store scraped data Extract data from APIs Since all scraping bots have the same purpose—to access site data—it can be difficult to distinguish between legitimate and malicious bots.

That said, several key differences help distinguish between the two. Legitimate bots are identified with the organization for which they scrape. Malicious bots, conversely, impersonate legitimate traffic by creating a false HTTP user agent. Malicious scrapers, on the other hand, crawl the website regardless of what the site operator has allowed.

See how Imperva Bot Management can help you with web scraping. Request demo Learn more. Article's content. Latest Blogs. DDoS Mitigation Application Security. As there were not so many websites available on the web, search engines at that time used to rely on their human website administrators to collect and edit the links into a particular format.

JumpStation brought a new leap. It is the first WWW search engine that relies on a web robot. Since then, people started to use these programmatic web crawlers to harvest and organize the Internet.

As web pages are designed for human users, and not for ease of automated use, even with the development of the web bot, it was still hard for computer engineers and scientists to do web scraping, let alone normal people.

So people have been dedicated to making web scraping more available. In , Salesforce and eBay launched their own API, with which programmers were enabled to access and download some of the data available to the public.

Since then, many websites offer web APIs for people to access their public database. APIs offer developers a more friendly way to do web scraping, by just gathering data provided by websites.

Not all websites offer APIs. So programmers were still working on developing an approach that could facilitate web scraping. In , Beautiful Soup was released. It is a library designed for Python. In computer programming, a library is a collection of script modules, like commonly used algorithms, that allow being used without rewriting, simplifying the programming process.

It is considered the most sophisticated and advanced library for web scraping, and also one of the most common and popular approaches today. Since then, web scraping is starting to hit the mainstream. Now for non-programmers, they can easily find more than 80 out-of-box data extraction software that provides visual processes. We collect data, process data, and turn data into actionable insights. It's proven that business giants like Microsoft and Amazon invest a lot of money on data collection about their consumers so as to target people with personalized ads.

Thanks to web scraping tools, a ny individual, company, and organization are now able to access web data for analysis. Some of the main use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence , news monitoring, lead generation , and market research among many others. In general, web data extraction is used by people and businesses who want to make use of the vast amount of publicly available web data to make smarter decisions.

And it should not be surprising because web scraping provides something really valuable that nothing else can: it gives you structured web data from any public website. Web data extraction — also widely known as data scraping — has a huge range of applications. A data scraping tool can help you automate the process of extracting information from other websites, quickly and accurately.

In the world of e-commerce, web data scraping is widely used for competitor price monitoring. Market research organizations and analysts depend on web data extraction to gauge consumer sentiment by keeping track of online product reviews, news articles, and feedback.

Data scraping tools are used to extract insight from news stories, using this information to guide investment strategies.

Similarly, researchers and analysts depend on data extraction to assess the financial health of companies. Insurance and financial services companies can mine a rich seam of alternative data scraped from the web to design new products and policies for their customers.

Data scraping tools are widely used in news and reputation monitoring, journalism, SEO monitoring, competitor analysis, data-driven marketing and lead generation, risk management, real estate, academic research, and much more. The web crawler is the horse, and the scraper is the chariot. The crawler leads the scraper, as if by hand, through the internet, where it extracts the data requested. A web scraper is a specialized tool designed to accurately and quickly extract data from a web page.

Web scrapers vary widely in design and complexity, depending on the project. An important part of every scraper is the data locators or selectors that are used to find the data that you want to extract from the HTML file - usually, XPath, CSS selectors, regex, or a combination of them is applied. A scraping tool typically makes HTTP requests to a target website and extracts the data from a page.

Usually, it parses content that is publicly accessible and visible to users and rendered by the server as HTML. However, if you intend to use data regularly scraping in your work, you may find a dedicated data scraping tool more effective. This tool works especially well with popular data scraping sources like Twitter and Wikipedia, as the plugin includes a greater variety of recipe options for such sites. As you can see, the tool has provided a table with the username of every account which had posted recently on the hashtag, plus their tweet and its URL.

Try installing the free version on Chrome, and have a play around with extracting data. Be sure to watch the intro movie they provide to get an idea of how the tool works and some simple ways to extract the data you want. WebHarvy WebHarvy is a point-and-click data scraper with a free trial version. As you will have gathered by this point, data scraping can come in handy just about anywhere where information is used.

Here are some key examples of how the technology is being used by marketers:.