Thousands and thousands of websites have a massive amount of data. Suppose you need access to this detailed information from a website. To get this, you’ll need to follow the correct format or page source the website uses and parse them appropriately. You can also find the information and copy-paste it into a document. Data extraction can be incredibly complicated. Good thing developers have created web scrapers. here you can get Web Scraping and Bots and Scraper Tools.
Covered Topics
Web Scraping
Web Scraping is like screen scraping or taking a screenshot. Although, screenshots make a copy of the pixels displayed on your screen. Web scraping extracts the HTML Code used as the foundation of the website. Scraping bots crawl websites and do the extraction. You can do it manually, but it would cost more money and time, so most prefer automated tools.Web Scraping and Bots and Scraper Tools.
Kinds of Web Scrapers
Different kinds of web scrapers vary in structure and use:
- Pre-built
- Self-built
- Browser extension
- Software
- User interface
- Cloud
- Local
Bots and Scraper Tools
Web scraping tools come in the form of software (bots) configured to sift over databases to extract the information needed. There is a wide variety of bot types, and most can be customized to:
- extract, organize and transform content
- Recognize particular HTML website structures
- Store data extracted
- Scrape data from APIs
How does it work?
The first step in web scraping is choosing your source. The URL of your source is what you need. When you prove it to the scraper, it will load the complete HTML code of the page source. Some more advanced scrapers can render the whole page, which includes their Javascript and CSS elements.
The web scraping tool user can choose whether they want to extract all the data or only specific data on the page.
If you have an advanced web scraper, when you extract, you will have also taken the data stored in the database of the website. The entire website content is then in your possession which you can now replicate elsewhere. It is exported as either a spreadsheet, CSV, or JSON for API, whichever is beneficial for the user who will receive it. The export format (Spreadsheet, JSON for API, or CSV) is the same when you choose to extract only from a specific page. The most commonly used forms are CSV or Excel spreadsheets.
Web Scraping Uses
There is a wide array of digital businesses that work on data harvesting. Data extraction and harvesting are also crucial activities in which there are only limited and specified legitimate use cases. These include:
Scraping for Search Engines
Search engines have bots crawling websites to analyze their content and rank them.
Market Research
Market Research bots harvest data from social media, forums, and other platforms for engagement, sentiment, and various analysis types.
Price Comparison
Price comparison websites deploy bots that extract prices from products, together with their product descriptions. They provide the data to allied seller websites.
Email Scraping
One popular technique in digital marketing is email marketing. However, email marketing is only possible when you have a list of email addresses to send your advertisements or engagement emails.
Web scraping does this for you. You’ll be able to grow your email list with the help of web scrapers. Suppose high-quality email lists are what you’re looking for. In that case, an email scraper will be able to extract them once you select substantial lead sources.
