Some websites have a vast amount of data that is critical to their survival and existence. They value their product details, sports stats, company contacts and stock prices so much that they protect it with every might. Meanwhile, as a third party, if you need access to any part of this information, web scraping can help.
Web scraping, otherwise called spidering, refers to an automatic way of gathering data from another website. Lately, it has become a core part of the functionalities of the Internet. A good example of this is seen in how Google uses the process of web scraping to build a search database that is worth multi-billion dollars.
The legality of Web Scraping
Large and small online businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of web scraping. Suitable for one purpose or another, the question of its legality makes it yet a subject to contemplate. Many use scraping for database building. And whether this is right or wrong, many are found in the business of web scraping. Naturally, websites do not have any problems with third party scraping. However, a website can refuse to scrape if they choose to. That is, regardless of its ubiquitous nature, web scraping is considered illegal. In fact, there are many laws binding unauthorized scraping. These restrictions affirm the illegality of web scraping and its applications.
How Web Scraping Works
Web scraping typically involves the use of bots for content and data extraction from a website. Apart from screen scraping, web scraping includes extraction of the HTML code of a website, and the data stored. The idea is that the entire website content can be replicated in some other place. Many digital businesses use web scraping and are heavily reliant on data harvesting. While it is considered legally dubious, some of the legitimate use cases are:
- Search engine bots to crawl, analyze the content and rank a website
- Price comparison bots that use bots to auto-fetch prices and execute product descriptions
- Market research functions to pull data from social media and forums.
Applicable Tools for Web Scraping
The web scraper is typically given one or more URLs to load before the actual scraping. After that, the scraper loads the HTML code for the page being considered. For more advanced scrapers, they render the entire website as well as the elements of CSS and Javascript. Many web scrapers print the output of their data to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet while others support formats like JSON which one can use for an API. Some web scraping tools and software are programmed to suit the data extraction task and are customized for:
- Recognition of unique HTML site structures
- Storage of scraped data
- Extraction of data from APIs
- Extraction and transformation of content
Truthfully, the resources required to run some of these web scraper bots are huge. This makes the operators invest so much in servers for the purpose of processing a large amount of data being extracted. In case the perpetrator lacks such a budget, they resort to the use of botnet. Thus, some malicious uses of web scraping are generally considered under the category of price scraping and content scraping
Final Verdict…
As new things unfold by the day, firms and persons are becoming more interested in the use of web scraping. While its applications are relatively non-exhaustive, some features are attributable to the best scraping tools for efficiency and effectiveness. They include JS rendering, geotargeting, allowance for large bulk scraping needs, minimum of 20 concurrent requests, high-quality proxies, ability to export all types of scraped data in different formats including TXT, HTML, CSV or Excel. Fundamentally, an understanding of its legality, how it works and its applications would compliment the choice of the best tool.
