Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is the process of extracting data from websites using web extensions or applications. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. Specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.

Web scraping a web page involves fetching and extracting. Fetching is the process of downloading of a page. Therefore, web crawling is a main component of web scraping, to fetch pages for later processing. Once fetched, then extraction can take place. The content of a page may be parsed, searched, reformatted, its data copied into a spreadsheet, and so on. Web scrapers typically take something out of a page, to make use of it for another purpose somewhere else.

What is Web Crawling used for?

Web scraping is used for contact scraping, and as a component of applications used for web indexing, web mining and data mining, online price change monitoring and price comparison, product review scraping (to watch the competition), gathering real estate listings, weather data monitoring, website change detection, research, tracking online presence and reputation, web mashup and, web data integration.

Web pages are built using text-based markup languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. As a result, specialized tools and software have been developed to facilitate the scraping of web pages.

Newer forms of web scraping involve listening to data feeds from web servers. For example, JSON is commonly used as a transport storage mechanism between the client and the web server.

Data to make or break your business

Get high-priority web data for your business, when you want it.

Get started

What Grepsr Does

We are a managed web scraping service platform where you can delegate your routine data scraping work to diligent software engineers who oversee the detailed deliverables of your project. We have an enterprise ready solutions that save you time and money. Contact us for Web Scraping Services or for ready made data sets.