Data Scraping

What Is Data Scraping?

Data scraping refers to a process whereby information is imported from an output generated from another program into local storage on your computer. It is a highly effective way of obtaining data from the internet for personal use, corporate use, or diversion to another website.

Commonly used for web content or business intelligence research purposes, for monitoring prices in ticketing and travel bookings, for surveys used in search engine optimization and social media algorithms, and for sending product data from electronic commerce websites to online vendors. It is applicable in every regard where data is valuable and can be moved. An application is used to obtain information from a website.

Deeper Definition

Usually, companies place restrictions on their online content to avoid downloads or unauthorized use. To this effect, efforts are made to limit public exposure to data through a consumable application programming interface or any other easily accessible data resource.

Scraper bots are targeted at extracting website data despite the best efforts to restrict access by the information owners. The process of web scraping will be revealed subsequently. A scraper bot sends an HTTP GET request to a specific website. The scraper bot is a piece of code that is used to pull the information. Upon receipt of the website’s response, the HTML document is parsed for a specific data pattern. The data extraction then leads to the conversion of the data into the preferred format of the scraper bot’s author.

Web scraping can be limited by limiting the maximum number of requests that a given IP address can make over a given time window, changing markup codes to prevent long-term data scraping. The use of CAPTCHAS for high-volume requesters and embedding content in media like images makes content a bit distorted and complex to organize, requiring optical character recognition (OCR) to extract the data from an image file. Their actions are different from those of web crawlers.

Data Scrapping Example

Efforts are being made such that artificial intelligence and machine learning can be integrated into the data scraping world. Images and text alike would be decoded with similar ease and accuracy as is being run in Google Incorporations.

John wanted to get a list of all the phone numbers of cleaning businesses in his area. John, therefore, created a small computer program to copy and save all the numbers of cleaners appearing on Yelp. This is data scraping.