Web scraping is a complex concept, from its definition to its applications in business and its huge impact on the future of business. Of course, there is another common term, web crawling. You may hear people confuse the two terms. Therefore, it is important to understand the difference between web scraping and web crawling. First, let's briefly summarize their characteristics, and then go deeper:
Web crawling collects web pages to build an index or collection. Web crawling, on the other hand, downloads web pages to extract specific data sets for analysis, such as product details, pricing information, SEO data, etc.
Crawling and crawling may sound the same, but there are actually some important differences between them. The two terms are closely related. Crawling and crawling are interrelated steps in the data collection process, and when one is completed, the other will follow.
What is data scraping?
Data scraping is easily confused with web scraping. Data scraping refers to taking any publicly available data (whether it is data on the Internet or data on your computer) and importing the information found into a local file on your computer. Sometimes this data can also be transferred to other websites. Data scraping is one of the most effective ways to get data from the web, without necessarily requiring the internet.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is the process of getting any publicly available data online and importing the information found into any local file on your computer. The main difference between it and data scraping is that web scraping requires the internet.
The above definition can also be used to help understand "scraping". If the term includes "web", it means that the internet is required. If the term includes "data", it means that the internet is not necessarily required for the crawling operation.
What is crawling?
Web crawling (or data crawling) is used for data extraction and refers to the collection of data from the World Wide Web; data crawling refers to or collects data from any document, file, etc. Generally speaking, web crawling is for large-scale data volumes, but it can also be small-scale data volumes. Therefore, it is often necessary to use a crawler agent.
According to the developers, a crawler is "a program that can connect to web pages and download content." Crawler programs surf the Internet to find two types of information: the data that users want to search for and more crawl targets.
If we want to crawl a real website, the process is as follows:
The crawler goes to your pre-set target
Discovers the product page
Then finds the relevant product data (price, title, description, etc.)
Then, download the product data found by the crawler, this part of the process is web crawling/data crawling.
In the article, you will see that we use these terms interchangeably to keep pace with relevant examples and external research. Please note that in most cases, when we talk about crawling, we mean web crawling/scraping, not data crawling/scraping. Some people blindly use them interchangeably without paying attention to their precise definitions.
[Difference between web crawling and web scraping]
The question is: What is the difference between crawling and scraping?
In order to have a general understanding of the main differences between crawling and scraping, you have to note that crawling refers to browsing and clicking on different targets, while scraping refers to collecting the data you find and downloading it to your computer, etc. Data scraping means that you know what data you want to collect and collect such data (for example, in the case of web crawling/scraping, what can be crawled is product data, price, title, description, etc.).
It is important to understand the difference between web crawling and web scraping, but crawling and scraping are often closely related. When you do web scraping, you can easily download information available online. Scraping can be used to extract data from search engines and e-commerce websites, and then by scraping the data, filter out unnecessary information and extract only the required information.
Web scraping can be done manually without using a crawler (especially if you only need to collect a small amount of data). Web scrapers usually come with crawling functions to filter out unnecessary information.
Therefore, for crawling and crawling (or web scraping and web crawling), let's sort out the important differences between the two to understand this pair of concepts more clearly:
◇ Operation behavior:
Web scraping: only "scrape" the relevant data (collect the selected data and download it).
Web scraping: only "crawl" the relevant data (browse the selected target).
◇ Completion method:
Web scraping: can be done manually.
Web scraping: can only be done through crawling agents (web spiders).
◇ Is deduplication needed:
Web crawling: Deduplication is not necessarily required because it can be done manually, and the data volume is relatively small.
Web crawling: Many online contents are duplicated. In order to avoid collecting too much duplicate information, crawlers will filter such duplicate data.
Summary
Now, we have a better understanding of the definitions of terms such as data crawling, data crawling, web crawling, and web crawling. In general, the difference between web crawling and web crawling is that crawling refers to browsing and clicking on data, while crawling refers to downloading the found data. As for expressions such as "network" or "data", if the term includes "network", it means that the Internet is required. If the term includes "data", it means that the Internet is not necessarily required for crawling operations.
Now we have made it clear that data crawling is crucial to the business field, both for customer acquisition and business and revenue growth. The prospects for data crawling are prosperous because the Internet has become the main source of intelligence information for enterprises. In order to gain business insights and stay ahead of the competition, more and more publicly available data needs to be crawled.