fbpx
Connect with us
Apply Now

Tech + Startups

What Is the Difference Between Web Scraping and Web Crawling? 3 things to know

Introduction

Today, it is common to use software that would help you with your work. There are multiple ways to collect information and data from the Internet world. Web scraping and web crawling are the most common. 

There is a lot of confusion surrounding the terms “web scraping” and “web crawling.” People often use them interchangeably, but they are actually two very different processes.

This article will explain the three main differences between web scraping and web crawling. It will also cover when and where each technique is appropriate to use. 

With today’s technology, there are many tools to help us with various tasks we need to do online. Instead of manually doing so you can use software for web scraping and web crawling. In addition to these software, you may also use a proxy. There are also many cheap residential proxies to help you perform web scraping and crawling seamlessly. 

Web Scraping

When starting a business or a website, you will need data. You may be a business owner in need of competitor or industry data. 

For example, you are starting out a perfume brand and you may find that another brand is doing very well on Instagram. Their customers or followers would be the perfect target market for you. But what do you do? Do you manually check each and every follower from their Instagram page? 

No. 

This is where web scraping software will be able to help you. 

Web scraping is a process that uses the extraction of a big amount of particular data from online sources. The extracted data is further explained and analyzed by a data observer to make more steady business commitments. 

Web scraping is a type of software that would help you with finding your desired content. A web scraper software can extract the original HTML code and the stored data in a database. 

A web scraping software may have direct access to the World Wide Web. This can be done by the use of a web browser or hypertext transfer protocol. Web scraping is a part of the extraction of web data. 

There are methods that you can use for web scraping. You can do it manually or download scraping software. Trying to scrape data manually would take a lot of your time and effort. Having web scraping software has changed the game. 

When using web scraping software you can get any open available online data.  You can then bring in any found information into any local file on your computer. 

Web Crawling

Considered as Spider, or Web crawler. This is a type of bot that is commonly used by search engines. Essentially this is what search engines like Bing, Google, or Yahoo do. 

Search Engines use crawling to look into the database and discover what content they cover and make approaches for the search engine’s index.

This is an operation of using tools to copy, read, and store the data of the websites for indexing and archiving uses.

Here are 3 Things you Should Know Between Web Scraping and Web Crawling:

  1. The primary purpose of web crawling is to index a website’s pages so that search engines can find them. The primary purpose of web scraping is to extract data from websites. 
  2. Web crawling is limited to gathering data from the pages that are linked from the starting page. Web scraping can extract data from any page on a website. 
  3. Web crawling can only be performed automatically using bots or spiders. Web scraping can be done either automatically or manually. 

Key Differences

Web Crawling is executed by programs or bots called “Web Spiders” or “Web Crawlers”.

The Web Crawlers perform the following:

It goes to the opening list of a particular uniform resource locator or also known as URL. The URL is also known as “seeds” during a visit of a crawler. If a crawler detects content on the web pages, It then brings it to the database and connects to the search engine index. 

After the Indexing, it will find other common links that were found on the initial web pages and adds them to the frontier.  Then the web crawler repeats it with new links until the frontier is empty.

Commonly the applications that are being used by this process are: 

  1. Webharvy
  2. Nokogiri
  3. NetSpeak Spider
  4. UiPath
  5. Helium Scraper

Meanwhile, web scraping is a procedure that is usually executed by programs called Web Scrapers.

The differences between Web Scraping and Web Crawling will determine where in the following: 

A web scraper takes the list of URLs loads all the HTML code for these websites, then gathers all data or data of the predefined type. It downloads the data and saves it in structured query language or also known as SQL, extensible markup language also known as XML, or excel format. 

Similarly, the market provides many automated web scrapers same as web crawling.

Here are the commonly used scraping tools:

  1. Octoparse 
  2. ScarpingBee
  3. Scrapy
  4. Fminer
  5. Parsehub

Data crawling usually indexes pages based on the content. Meanwhile, data scraping extracts information from the contents of the pages. Between crawling and scraping methods, they are used by crawling and scraping bots on each process.

Web Crawling can be used for the following instances:

Web scraping can be used for the following instances:

  • Stock market analysis
  • Managing brand reputation
  • Academic and scientific research
  • Collecting data sets for machine learning
  • Comparing Prices
  • Generating Leads
  • Market research for new products

Conclusion

Scraping and crawling are two different techniques used to extract data from websites. Crawlers are automated, whereas scrapers can be either automated or manual. 

After learning about the differences between web scraping and web crawling and why it is an essential tool for your business. This is an essential use and a method to collect data.

Web crawling is commonly performed by large corporations. Meanwhile, web scraping is often used by small and large businesses. 

Web crawlers will allow you to automate crawling activities and scan websites. And lastly, web scraping tools will automate data extraction from multiple resources.

We hope this article helps you with your data-gathering journey!

Related Topics:
Continue Reading
Advertisement Apply Now


Copyright © 2022 Disrupt ™ Magazine is a Minority Owned Privately Held Company - Disrupt ™ was founder by Puerto Rican serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Tony Delgado who is on a mission to transform Latin America using the power of education and entrepreneurship.

Disrupt ™ Magazine
151 Calle San Francisco
Suite 200
San Juan, Puerto Rico, 00901

Opinions expressed by Disrupt Contributors are their own. Disrupt Magazine invites voices from many diverse walks of life to share their perspectives on our contributor platform. We are big believers in freedom of speech and while we do enforce our community guidelines, we do not actively censor stories on our platform because we want to give our contributors the freedom to express their opinions. Articles are not commissioned by our editorial team, and opinions expressed by our community contributors do not reflect the opinions of Disrupt or its employees.
We are committed to fighting the spread of misinformation online so if you feel an article on our platform goes against our community guidelines or contains false information, we do encourage you to report it. We need your help to fight the spread of misinformation. For more information please visit our Contributor Guidelines available here.


Disrupt ™ is the voice of latino entrepreneurs around the world. We are part of a movement to increase diversity in the technology industry and we are focused on using entrepreneurship to grow new economies in underserved communities both here in Puerto Rico and throughout Latin America. We enable millennials to become what they want to become in life by learning new skills and leveraging the power of the digital economy. We are living proof that all you need to succeed in this new economy is a landing page and a dream. Disrupt tells the stories of the world top entrepreneurs, developers, creators, and digital marketers and help empower them to teach others the skills they used to grow their careers, chase their passions and create financial freedom for themselves, their families, and their lives, all while living out their true purpose. We recognize the fact that most young people are opting to skip college in exchange for entrepreneurship and real-life experience. Disrupt Magazine was designed to give the world a taste of that.