Nowadays, the digital world revolves around data. Businesses and savvy individuals use publicly available information to improve their practices and gain an edge over the competition. Those who decide not to do so immediately start lagging behind.
If you, too, don’t want to miss out on crucial information, you’ll want to consider web scraping, as it’s the best method for collecting large amounts of information from the web. Follow along to learn all about it, as well as the most popular use cases and legal intricacies tied to web scraping.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process of collecting data from a website or a group of websites. It’s typically done with the help of specialized tools that take large amounts of unstructured data from the internet and deliver it in a structured format. The data is usually delivered in either a CSV or JSON format.
At its core, web scraping is not much different from simply visiting a website and copying its contents. It’s just done at a scale that would be impossible to reach manually.
Web scraping tools are typically made of two main parts — the crawler and the scraper. The crawler, also called a spider, crawls the web looking for websites that meet your requirements. Then, the scraper collects the HTML code of said websites, filters the data in them, and provides it to the user in a structured format.
How does Web Scraping work?
The complete process, from making your request to receiving scraped data, depends on whether or not your scraper comes with a crawler.
If it doesn’t, you’ll have to manually select and enter the websites or URLs you wish to scrape into your tool. If a crawler is included in the tool, you’ll have to define what it needs to look for in a website before passing it over to the scraper. Other than that, the process looks fairly similar:
- Enter the list of URLs or define the URLs to look for;
- Run the scraper to extract the HTML code from these URLs;
- Download the scraped and formatted data.
Types of web scrapers
While all web scraping tools are designed to perform the same task, they can still be categorized based on how they’re set up and what resources they use.
- Self-built — some tech-savvy users build their own web scraping tools. That said, it requires quite a lot of programming skills and general tech knowledge, which is why most users prefer pre-build options;
- Pre-built — these are web scraping tools that are made by someone else. All you need to do is download and install them to get started;
- Software scrapers — these are the scrapers you would install as a piece of software on your device;
- Browser extension scrapers — these are scrapers that you install as browser extensions rather than separate apps;
- Cloud-based — scrapers that operate in the cloud and use the cloud’s resources rather than adding the load on your device;
- Local — scrapers that operate on your device and use local resources rather than those on a cloud.
What are the use cases of Web Scraping?
Collecting large amounts of data is nice and all, but it’s not worth much if you just let it collect dust in your hard drive. Thankfully, there are plenty of use cases for web scraping, so you’ll definitely find a way to make that precious data work.
Price monitoring
Scrape the web to monitor the pricing of your competitors and ensure that the pricing of your products or services remains competitive in the market. If you scrape the web regularly, you can set up dynamic pricing on your website to adjust according to any changes in the pricing of your competitors.
This is particularly crucial once your business starts scaling, and even the slightest differences in pricing can mean a big difference in total revenue.
Market research
Performing market research is crucial whether you’re looking to start a new company or improve your current situation. It allows you to better understand consumer trends and what they might be looking for in a product or service.
It gives you an entry point into the market and helps you decide whether or not starting a business in a certain niche is a good idea overall.
AI learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools need an enormous amount of data in order to learn and improve. Whether it’s recognizing imagery or speech patterns, the more data AI analyzes, the better it gets. Since web scraping is the best option for quickly obtaining large amounts of data, AI tools use it to improve their algorithms.
SEO monitoring
SEO allows you to be seen online without investing ridiculous amounts of money into ads or affiliate content. To achieve the best results, companies may scrape the web to analyze search results, competitor backlink profiles, and keyword potential.
This information can then be used to create or update SEO content of your own and start improving your rankings on Google and other search consoles.
Financial market analysis
Investors may use web scrapers to analyze changes and tendencies within the stock, crypto, or other markets, as well as the most recent financial news. This makes the decision-making process a lot easier and leads to a better return on investments.
Real estate market analysis
Whether you’re buying, selling, or working as a real estate agent, you may benefit from web scraping. It allows you to collect exact pricing data on real estate in a general area, as well as other information, such as how long a unit normally takes to sell.
You can use this data to avoid overpaying or undercharging for property and save yourself quite a bit of money.
Web Scraping Examples
Theoretical use cases are nice to know, but sometimes illustrating the benefits of web scraping can be easier with concrete examples of how it can be used. Here are a few websites that use web scraping for the benefit of their users:
- Abuse.ch — scrapes the web to identify potentially malicious or dangerous websites, with a strong focus on malware and botnets. By scraping the web and looking for common identifiers of these threats, Abuse.ch helps people and organizations stay safer online.
- YouGov Sport — scrapes social media and other platforms to help businesses gain advertising insights. Specifically, it helps with understanding the branding value of a particular company for different sports events;
- Shopee — collects information on e-commerce trends and helps people of businesses come up with product ideas or speed up product development.
Potential issues with Web Scraping
As you may expect, not all websites like it when you scrape their data, even if you do so without breaking the law or any legal agreements. To fight it, websites may block your IP, add CAPTCHAs, fingerprint your browser, and use any means necessary to prevent scraping.
That’s why most users run web scrapers through proxy servers. This allows you to overcome a vast majority of the issues you may face. That’s a large part of the reason why generic web scraping was named the second most popular proxy use case by Proxyway's 2024 market research.
The most popular use case — E-Commerce — can also be linked to web scraping since it’s often used to improve e-commerce platforms. This means up to 45.8% of proxy users use the service for web scraping.
Is Web Scraping legal?
Yes, web scraping is legal as long as it’s done according to the law and all user agreements. This usually means that you can only scrape publicly available information that isn’t hidden behind any paywalls and doesn’t require you to log into an account.
Web scraping is regulated by laws such as GDPR, COPPA, and CFAA. One crucial point in many related laws is that you can’t collect user information without their consent. So while it may seem tempting to scrape the web for emails or other personal information for advertising purposes, it will be illegal in most cases.
That said, there’s plenty of useful information that doesn’t require you to pay for it, create an account, or agree to any Terms of Service to access. This information is normally completely legal to scrape and use for your own benefit as long as it’s not done to harm others.
How do you scrape the web ethically?
Even though it’s fully legal, web scraping can put a significant load on a website, slowing it down. To avoid encountering any issues or having to respond to complaints, make sure your scraping is both legal and ethical.
Don’t bombard any website with so many requests that its performance drops. Be mindful and sensible whenever you collect publicly available information. On top of that, many websites provide APIs with all public information. You can simply download them and use this information instead of having to use a scraper to retrieve it.
Conclusion
Simply put, web scraping is a practice that every business should implement if it wants to drive growth and avoid falling behind the competition. It provides a way to make data-driven decisions without doing any guesswork or relying on intuition alone.
Needless to say, it’s something that anyone can benefit from. And with numerous web scraping tools and quality proxy services available today, it’s only a matter of setting it all up and reaping the rewards.
