What Is Web Scraping? How It Works and Where It Is Used

Data plays a central role in business growth strategies. To get into a data store and make the best use of the data, you need a solid process for collecting information. That process is web scraping. In this article, Mona Media will help you better understand What is web scraping.

What is web scraping?

In short, web scraping is a tool that extracts data from a website and outputs it in a different format. It is also known as site scraping or data scraping.

The purpose of scraping is to extract the information you need from a web page for other uses. Example: a flight price comparison app, for example, tells you which airline is cheapest and fastest.

Web scraping is also used for countless other purposes, limited mostly by people's creativity. Because the amount of information extracted is usually large, the results are often shown in spreadsheet formats such as CSV or XLSX (Microsoft Excel's format). However, if the data is then used to run APIs (application programming interface application programming interfaces), the output format will be JSON.

Web scraping can be done manually by a person or automatically by a robot. The robots that extract website information are called (web) crawlers.

How web scraping works

To scrape, the crawler bots are first given the URLs of the target websites. Next, they read the database (database) of those pages and filter out the types of information specified. Finally, they export the data to a spreadsheet so you can start using it.

Overall, the scraping process has only 3 simple steps. The real challenge for developers is how to collect and filter the information to get the result they want.

Uses of web scraping

Search tool

Many people are surprised to learn that Google is the largest web scraper on the internet. Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo are typical examples of web scraping.

To rank websites, search engine crawler bots constantly extract web page content. The content data is fed into very complex algorithms that rate pages against each search engine's own criteria.

Market research

Web scraping is a powerful tool for companies and apps doing market research. The reason is that this work requires collecting huge amounts of data from many different sources.

Crawler bots are used to extract the figures related to the aspect being studied, and the results are combined into a complete database. From that, people can analyze and identify market trends and predict how the market will shift in the future.

Another field that uses web scraping is customer insights research. Customer insights is the study of customers' psychology and consumer behavior. It requires looking at many subtle factors that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

For that reason, web scraping is used to extract social conversations as data for customer insights analysis.

Price tracking

As in the example above, web scraping is widely used in tools that track and compare market prices. Marketers benefit from web scraping in market research, while consumers are the direct users of price comparison apps.

Besides comparing flight prices, it is also used to get bus fares and hotel room prices, and to compare prices of meat, fish or dietary supplements. Investors also rely on tools that compare and track stock prices. With dozens of stocks and thousands of trades every day, stock price trackers help them calculate their investments more accurately.

Real estate and cryptocurrency are other fields that need tools with web scraping to get data.

There is also a more underhanded use of web scraping: brands, online shops and even e-commerce platforms collecting information on their competitors. They want to see competitors' prices in advance and lower their own prices to gain a competitive edge.

News aggregator websites and portals

While browsing the web you may come across news websites that are not actual newspapers. Today the internet has countless sites like this. They are called portals, and they offer a larger and more varied amount of news than any single newspaper.

Sometimes a portal is not a website but an app, most often a mobile app or the news reader on a web browser's new tab page.

All of these variations work the same way: they crawl articles from many different news sources before showing them to readers. News aggregator websites are one of the most common uses of web scraping today.

Good and bad web scraping

As mentioned, web scraping has countless uses depending on people's creativity. Some people may therefore use it for bad or even illegal purposes.

In practice, the law is still loose about how web scraping is regulated. But it can be understood that using web scraping to gain a competitive advantage is not something that is supported.

Many websites use web scraping to extract information from competitors' sites. Some plagiarize, using a competitor's articles word for word as their own content. Online shops check competitors' prices and promotions in advance to gain an unfair competitive advantage.

Hackers must also be mentioned. They use web scraping to collect website data in order to exploit security vulnerabilities, steal data and extort money.

Even when website data is hidden or protected, it can still be stolen, which raises serious concerns about cybersecurity.

You may also be interested in:

• Ways to improve website security
• How to recognize and avoid phishing emails

How to stop bad web scraping

To prevent your data from being extracted illegally, you need to take safety measures and strengthen your website's security.

• Install specialized tools that track user behavior so you can tell which visits come from people and which come from bots.
• Watch for newly created accounts that buy little or nothing but are very active, constantly viewing your product pages.
• Tell people from machines by requiring them to accept terms and rules or enter a captcha.
• Use and update the latest security technology and the strongest bot protection.

That is the end of the article explaining What is web scraping and related useful information. Web scraping is the foundation of many of the most popular and influential tools and apps in people's lives today. However, some people use it for improper purposes, and you need to put protective measures in place for your website right away.