Have you ever wanted to extract a lot of information from a website?

Depending on how much data you’re looking to extract, copying and pasting might not do the job.

Web Scraping (also termed Screen Scraping, Web Data Extraction, Web Harvesting etc.) is a technique employed to extract large amounts of data from websites whereby the data is extracted and saved to a local file in your computer or to a database in table (spreadsheet) format. Data displayed by most websites can only be viewed using a web browser. Dec 17, 2020 Web crawling (or data crawling) is used for data extraction and refers to collecting data from either the world wide web, or in data crawling cases – any document, file, etc. Traditionally, it is done in large quantities, but not limited to small workloads. Therefore, usually done with a crawler agent. Web scraping is a fast and easy way to extract data from the web. It is an automated process using a bot or a web crawler through the HTTP protocol or a web browser. Target data is stored in a central local database or a spreadsheet and is later used for retrieval or analysis. Web scraping service can be applied for different business processes. Web Scraping refers to an application that processes the HTML of a Web page to extract data for manipulation such as converting the Web page to another format (i.e. Web Scraping scripts and applications will simulate a person viewing a Web site with a browser.

Here’s where web scraping can help. Today we will define web scraping and go over how it differs from other similar terms.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping refers to the process of extracting data from a website on to a format that is more convenient for the user.

Web scraping can be done manually, however, automated tools are usually preferred due to speed, convenience, and lower costs.

These automated tools are known as Web Scrapers. These can have different sets of features depending on the kind of website you’re looking to scrape.

Want to learn more about web scraping? Check our in-depth guide on web scraping and what it is used for.

Web Scraping vs Web Crawling

Web Scraping is often confused with Web Crawling. However, they refer to different processes. I zip for mac os.

Web Crawling refers to the process of using bots and spiders to read, scrape and store all the data from a website. Most commonly, this technique is used by search engines to build their site indexes. This is how Google can tell if what pages contain the information you’re looking for.

If you want to learn more, read our guide on the differences between web scraping and web crawling.

Web Scraping vs Data Mining

Web Scraping is also often confused with Data Mining. Again, in this case, both refer to separate processes.

Data Mining refers to the process of in-depth analysis of massively large databases.

These analyses can be advanced enough to require the use of complex algorithms and AI.

While Web Scraping can be used to build the data sets that will be analyzed via Data Mining, they still stand as separate processes.

Want to learn more? Read our in-depth article about the differences between Web Scraping and Data Mining.

Online Web Scraper

Web Scraping vs API

Lastly, Web Scraping is often also confused with APIs. After all, they do refer to very similar processes.

An API (Application Programming Interface) refers to a set of procedures and protocols that allow for the access of data from a specific database. For example, a weather forecast agency can build an API for news agencies and developers to access weather data and build their own tools or content.

In cases where an API might not be available, a web scraper can help you in accessing the data you want via extraction.

Want to learn more? Read our article about the differences between APIs and Web Scraping.

Getting Started with Web Scraping

Now that you know the basics of web scraping, you might be interested in starting your first web scraping project.

While it might sound intimidating, web scraping is way easier than you think. It can also be done with free tools.

Image editor for mac free. In fact, we’ve put together a step-by-step tutorial on how to scrape data from any website for free.

Happy Scraping!

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Web Scraper Meaning In Computer

Web Scraping (also termed Screen Scraping, Web Data Extraction, Web Harvesting etc.) is a technique employed to extract large amounts of data from websites whereby the data is extracted and saved to a local file in your computer or to a database in table (spreadsheet) format.

Data displayed by most websites can only be viewed using a web browser. They do not offer the functionality to save a copy of this data for personal use. The only option then is to manually copy and paste the data - a very tedious job which can take many hours or sometimes days to complete. Web Scraping is the technique of automating this process, so that instead of manually copying the data from websites, the Web Scraping software will perform the same task within a fraction of the time.

A web scraping software will automatically load and extract data from multiple pages of websites based on your requirement. It is either custom built for a specific website or is one which can be configured to work with any website. With the click of a button you can easily save the data available in the website to a file in your computer.

Web Scraper Meaning In Urdu

Practical Usage Scenarios

• 1. Extract product details including price, images etc. from eCommerce websites for populating other websites, competition monitoring etc.


• 2. Extract business contact details including name, address, email, phone, website etc. from Yellow Pages, Google Maps etc. for marketing and lead generation.


• 3. Extract property details as well as agent contact details from real estate websites.

Methods of Web Scraping

• 1. Using software



Web Scraping software falls under 2 categories. First, which can be locally installed in your computer and second, which runs in cloud - browser based. WebHarvy, OutWit Hub, Visual Web Ripper etc. are examples of web scraping software which can be installed in your computer, whereas import.io, Mozenda etc. Abbyy for mac. are examples of cloud data extraction platforms.

• 2. Writing code



You can hire a developer to build custom data extraction software for your specific requirement. The developer can in-turn make use of web scraping APIs which helps him/her develop the software easily. For example apify.com lets you easily get APIs to scrape data from any website.

Our Solution

Web Scraper Meaning Wikipedia

The problem with most generic web scraping software is that they are very difficult to setup and use. There is a steep learning curve involved. WebHarvy was designed to solve this problem. With a very intuitive, point and click interface, WebHarvy allows you to start extracting data within minutes from any website.

Please watch the following demonstration which shows how easy it is to configure and use WebHarvy for your data extraction needs.

C# Web Scraper

As shown in the video above, WebHarvy is a point and click web scraper (visual web scraper) which lets you scrape data from websites with ease. Unlike most other web scraper software, WebHarvy can be configured to extract the required data from websites with mouse clicks. You just need to select the data to be extracted by pointing the mouse. Yes, it is that easy !. We recommend that you try the evaluation version of WebHarvy or see the video demo.

Web Scraper Software

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