What Is Web Scraping?

In this lesson, let's explore web scraping, why it’s essential, and how it can help us.

Definition

Web scraping is a technique used to extract and gather data from websites. It involves automatically retrieving information from web pages by sending HTTP requests, parsing the HTML or XML content of the response, and extracting the desired data. This data can then be processed, analyzed, or stored for various purposes.

Web scraping is the process of programmatically extracting data from websites, typically using software tools or scripts that simulate human web browsing behavior.

Sounds confusing? Let's go through an example to see what this means.

A concrete example

Let's say a market researcher works for a retail company that wants to track the prices of its competitors' products.

One way to do this would be to,

• Manually visit each competitor’s website.

• Record the prices of the relevant products.

• Prepare/format data into a spreadsheet or database to analyze conveniently.

Just think how time-consuming and error-prone this can be, especially if there are many competitors and products to track.

Instead of manually visiting each website, searching for products, and noting down prices, web scraping allows us to retrieve the data programmatically to a convenient output like a spreadsheet. This saves significant time and effort, especially when monitoring multiple competitors or many products.

Further, by scheduling regular scraping tasks, we can continuously monitor price changes and receive the latest information. This enables us to stay up-to-date with market dynamics and respond promptly to any pricing adjustments made by competitors. Conducting these activities manually will be a huge effort and time.

This is the idea behind the web scrapping technique at a very basic level.