Introduction
I have done this simple and fast introduction to the web scraping technique, to share with you what I have learned studying this topic.
What is web scraping
Why is it important
Web Scraping vs API
What can we do with the data scraped
Is Ethical to perform web scraping?
What is web scraping
Web scraping, or web crawling, is the process of extracting data from websites for analysis or any other purposes. Web scraping is done automatically using bots or web crawlers to speed up the process of collecting data from websites. This technique is widely used in the field of data analysis, research, and business intelligence. With web scraping, businesses can collect and analyze data from various sources to identify patterns and trends, determine customer behavior, or monitor competitor activities. Overall, web scraping helps businesses gather valuable insights from websites that are not easily accessible through traditional methods.
Why is it important
From what I have learned web scraping is important for various reasons. Firstly, it helps individuals and organizations to collect data from websites that would otherwise be time-consuming to gather.
It can also be used to gather data for various research purposes such as academic studies, market research or journalistic investigations.
Another important aspect of web scraping is that it can automate many tasks that would otherwise require hours of manual work. For example, it can help organizations keep their prices and product information up-to-date by automatically collecting information and updating their websites.
Overall, web scraping is a valuable tool for organizations to gather information, gain insights, and automate tasks. It helps businesses stay competitive, make informed decisions, and streamline processes, making it an essential tool for modern-day business.
Web Scraping vs API
The main difference between these two ways to get data, in my opinion, is in the design of API because to get data from API you need an access token and you have a certain amount of requests that you can perform, and also you would have to perform a lot of request to a lot of APIs to collect a lot of data; instead with web scraping, you can simply write a web crawler that goes through all the website you need to scrape and save data.
What can we do with the data scraped
As mentioned before the application for the data extracted from the internet are a lot. The most relevant I know are making statistic models, data sets for machine learning and a lot more.
I think that all depends on what you need to do with the data.
Is Ethical to perform web scraping?
I think that the answer to this question is: it depends. From my very little experience I suppose that if you don't use data protected by copyright to make money, there are no problems.
Some technical problems could be that some websites could have systems to block massive web scraping bots, but fortunately for most of theme, there are some ways to don't get your bot blocked.
Conclusion
I hope that with this simple and fast introduction to web scraping, you could understand better this technique to get data from the internet.
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