Ever wondered who’s scrolling through the internet at 3 am? Believe it or not, nearly half of all web traffic isn’t human – it’s bots! (Source: Imperva)
These bots encompass both web crawlers and web scrapers.
In short, web crawlers are bots that discover new URLs or links on the web, while web scrapers are bots that extract data from pages on the web.
In this blog, we will learn the difference between web crawling and web scraping, their purpose, and their application.
What is web crawling?
Web crawling is the process of using crawlers which are automated programs that browse the web to discover new URLs from websites. Spiders is another name for crawlers and the two are used interchangeably. It retrieves the content of these URLs; like HTML, images, text, videos, CSS files, and JavaScript files.
It scans and analyzes each page to discover embedded hyperlinks within the page, it follows that link to explore new content. Then it moves to another link embedded in that page, and from that to another and another. This way the crawler explores the web, discovers new pages, and indexes information.
But before indexing, it processes the fetched content by parsing the HTML, transforming data into meaningful information. Then, it stores the information in a database known as the search index which allows search engines to quickly show useful results when a user performs a relevant search query.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is the process of fetching the content of a publicly available web page, and parsing its HTML to extract specific data points. Then storing the data in a structured file or warehouse for data mining, competitive analysis, aggregation, and beyond.
Coding professionals use Python libraries like BeautifulSoup for scraping. Or web data extraction tools like Pline to automate the extraction of specific data from a target website.
However, managed data extraction services like Grepsr enable enterprises to deploy multiple crawlers to extract targeted data points from the web, at scale.
In a data extraction project, both web crawling and web scraping go hand in hand. When one occurs, the other follows.
For instance, if you don’t know the exact URLs from a website, that you need data from. Let’s say Headsets from Amazon – web crawlers help identify those web pages. Consecutively, the web scraper extracts the specific data points you require from those pages. Such as the product name and price of the Headsets.
Key Differences
We often hear these terms used interchangeably, but there are major differences between them.
Web Crawling | Web Scraping | |
Purpose | Web crawling involves systematically browsing the web to index web pages. Typically, search engines use web crawling to index a large amount of data from thousands of websites. This data is then used to provide relevant results for user queries. | Web scraping involves extracting or downloading data from web pages in a structured format. It only gathers information from selected, specific data points for further analysis to guide business decisions. |
Functionality | Crawlers, also referred to as spiders, start with a list of URLs to crawl and follow links on those pages to discover new pages. They aim to cover as much of the web as possible. | Scrapers browse web pages to extract specific data points such as product details, prices, seller’s contact information, etc based on user-defined criteria. |
Scope | The scope of crawlers is generally broader as they discover and index entire website contents of multiple websites in larger portions. | The scope is comparatively narrower because it targets specific elements from a few selected webpages but the scope can be expanded as per business needs or client expectations. |
Complexity | Crawlers need to navigate complex websites, their dynamic content and page structure, and their protocols like “robots.txt” which allows only certain parts of the site to be accessed for storing information in segmented databases. | Scrapers have to deal with the complexities of extracting data from unstructured web pages into a structured format or extracting precise insights from the noise. |
Usage | It is used by search engines to index large amounts of data. | It is used by businesses and companies for data collection, market research, competitor analysis, brand equity measurement, and more targeted use cases. |
Examples | The search engine Google uses web crawler bots to index information and show precise results for user queries. Bing and Yahoo are also the same. | Pline is a newly released AI-powered browser extension that is a self-serve data extraction tool for small-scale projects. One can extract data from a webpage without the need for manual scraping or coding experience by simply specifying the data fields. Grepsr provides managed data extraction services for enterprises, offering custom end-to-end data solutions with in-depth expertise. They help clients focus on what matters through workflow automation of data acquisition. |
These are the differences between web crawling vs web scraping and their applications.
Web Scraping Services
An individual writing scripts for data extraction encounters countless challenges that are hard to navigate with limited resources and expertise in the industry.
While opting for a tool can help ease the process, it still has limits. Such as anti-scraping measures adopted by websites i.e. CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, login time, and scalability.
However, if you opt for a web scraping service provider with a team of seasoned experts and decades of experience, like Grepsr, you wouldn’t have to go through the anguish. Bypassing such anti-scraping measures effortlessly by rotating IP addresses, residential proxies, and throttling.
Not just that but we also offer robust data cleaning, normalization, and integration solutions to ensure high-quality data to meet and exceed our client’s expectations.
In terms of scalability, our service has the infrastructure and expertise to manage large-scale scraping projects efficiently. Unlike tools that face challenges in handling large volumes of data across numerous websites.
Thus, for high-quality and instantly actionable data at scale, Grepsr’s expertise is at your disposal.