Web crawling vs. web scraping (automating data extraction) for business—it’s a tale as old as the technologies themselves. While the two are very similar technologies, they still have some key differences that define their use.
Web crawling is done by spider bots and is used by companies such as Google to index websites. On the other hand, Web scraping is done by scraper bots and is used to accumulate vital data and information from readily available or inaccessible places.
These technologies work through bots, proxies, and other techniques. In this article, we’ll explore web scraping and web crawling and give you some key reasons why your business can benefit from using both of them.
What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping, also known as web data extraction, is the process of automatically extracting large amounts of data from websites. This data can include text, images, links, and other types of content. The primary goal of web scraping is to transform unstructured data on the web into a structured format that can be analyzed and used for various business purposes.
How Web Scraping Works
Web scraping involves several steps: Web crawling vs web scraping (automating data extraction) for business – Let’s see the key differences in this article.
- Identifying the Target Website: Determine which website contains the data you need.
- Sending a Request: Use a web scraping tool or a custom script to send an HTTP request to the website’s server.
- Parsing the HTML: Once the server responds, the HTML content of the webpage is retrieved and parsed.
- Extracting Data: Specific data points are extracted from the parsed HTML using techniques like XPath, CSS selectors, or regular expressions.
- Storing Data: The extracted data is stored in a structured format, such as a CSV file, database, or JSON file, for further analysis.
Web Scraping and Why You Should Care About It
The Web scraping, better known as data harvesting, is a process by bots that extracts vast amounts of data from websites. This data can be readily available on the websites or hidden behind firewalls and proxies.
The use of web scraping for business with good docs, and it’s not necessarily legal for some purposes, like corporate espionage. Otherwise, using data scraping bots to accumulate vast amounts of data is completely legal as long as it does not break any laws.
Scraping bots are at the forefront of many technologies, the most notable of which is big data. Big data is a technology that defines enormous data centers, vital to other technologies such as AI and machine learning, and can serve critical analytical purposes.
In the past, this process was manually performed by human operators and took quite a lot of time. These days, the process is automated using bots, which cuts down on costs, improves performance, and streamlines data harvesting as a whole. Companies can focus on data analysis and decision-making rather than data-gathering processes.
Web Crawling vs Web Scraping
The differences between web crawling and web scraping are far more apparent than you might think. Crawling merely crawls the web to index the content found on websites. On the other hand, Web scraping uses crawler bots to save the data found on various websites, usually in a cloud or drive storage or spreadsheet format. If you want to delve deeper into web crawling vs web scraping differences, we suggest you read more on the Oxylabs website.
Businesses Should Be Using Both
Both are fantastic technologies with many business applications that work best when combined. Companies can accumulate vast amounts of data for further analysis, indexing, or recovery through these technologies.
To put this into perspective, companies can use these vast data storages to overcome issues they have yet to encounter. They can also accumulate accurate data to cut down on data refinement costs, thus streamlining machine learning. Web crawling vs web scraping (automating data extraction) for business – Let’s see the key differences in this article.
How They Can Help Your Business Grow
The benefits of web crawling and data harvesting for businesses are irrefutable. The first thing that comes to mind is the lead generation potential of these two technologies. Businesses will no longer have to struggle with overly elaborate lead generation strategies, as web scraping promises to simplify them by a considerable margin.
Another thing that comes to mind is the UX and UI aspects. Through data harvesting and web crawling, companies can accumulate much data on existing customers and prospects. This data can then be up to to create a unique and adaptable UI that augments the UX massively.
Optimizing internal operations has always been a dreaded and tedious task. However, through the use of data harvesting, companies can gain a better perspective on their business based on the performance of their competition. That allows them to streamline internal processes, modify or optimize their pricing, and increase ROI while cutting operational costs.
Lastly, using these two technologies in marketing and data science is sound. More efficient SEO monitoring becomes possible through web crawling and data harvesting. Allowing companies to create content that appeals to their target demographic. Companies can also gather competitive information and ensure data-driven marketing, pricing, and other business strategies.
Alternatively, data analysis is also a far more efficient and cost-effective endeavor. When there is more data to study, analyze, and research.
Web Scraping for Business Conclusion
These two technologies will revolutionize the world of business in more ways than one. Their combination promises to change the world of data as we know it. While companies such as Google have been using these technologies for a while, they’re just now starting to reach their full potential.
Businesses of any size can benefit from extensive data centers. Through these technologies, they can create these streamlined and cost-effectively.
