Web scraping and web crawling are two different concepts but are somehow interrelated. Today, more and more people (business owners) use such services when it comes to identifying and extracting information. However, it must be noted that web crawling is quite different from web scraping. Former is a procedure that is all about browsing through the internet in a systematic way by spiders or bots.
Let’s understand web crawling
Of course, both techniques (Web scraping and web crawling ) look similar but are not. In simple terms, web crawling is the detailed process of finding information on the web (World Wide Web), indexing all the words, adding them to a database, following the given hyper links and adding that information to the database.
No doubt, it is an extensive process, but happens in the minimum possible time. Here, the web crawler or bot is is a software program that actually explores and visits websites and scans their pages in order to index them.
Let’s understand web scraping
However, when it comes to web scraping; it is the process of requesting a web document and gathering information from it. Simply put, in order to perform web scraping, you have to leverage web crawling.
Web Scraping or web harvesting, or web data extraction is often targeted at specific websites for very particular data, for example - business leads, traffic, etc.
Benefits to businesses
Business owners take advantage of web scrapping services for a wide range of purposes such as weather data monitoring, website change, research, real estate listing, reputation management, tracking, etc. They use it for their marketing efforts and empower their teams. In other words, the dramatic importance of Web Scraping cannot be ignored.
In pursuit of the same, they contact data extraction service providers who can provide comprehensive web scrapping services. They provide the most relevant data to assist businesses of all sizes and sectors.
Businesses also study and analyze the up-to-date data (business critical information) provided by such companies and empower their overall business. Since digital transformation is gaining momentum, businesses are using and embracing such services to stay ahead of the curve and of course, achieve their vision.