Web scraping also called web crawling, screen scraping, web data extraction is a familiar term to most people, especially in such digitization of a data-dominated era. Web scraping is basically a computer-based technique for accessing the web through a web browser or to obtain data.
With the help of web scraping software, you can automate the data extraction process in an efficient, no matter how large the data, and can save themselves from tedious manual work "copy and paste".
Image Source: Google
What can web scraping do?
It is generally applied in many aspects of our lives, especially the functionality of the Internet. Let's take Google as an example. Google uses web scraping to build a database search, and most sites will give Google permission to scrape their websites to rank higher in the search results.
Here are some other use cases in different industries:
E-commerce –
Retailers using web scraping to automate the process of tracking the price of their competitors, build product profiles and collect customer reviews for sentiment analysis.
Marketing / Advertising –
New ideas are important for content marketing. Web scraping is used to collect data from different sites, such as social media sites, and the data can help generate insights to create fresh and interesting content.
Housing –
Many property companies erode the list of sites of different properties to collect aggregate data.