What Is Web Scraping? All You Need to Know

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites, typically employing automatic tools or bots. It is used across different industries, such as marketing, finance, E-commerce, and real estate. Web scraping helps companies find their target audience, generate leads, analyze the market and their competitors, and create a better strategy to grow their businesses.

What Is Web Scraping?

The act of copying data from websites by using bots or automatic tools and collecting or storing it for later use is called web scraping. The process involves downloading web pages and copying their data into a local database or spreadsheet. Companies or individuals who web scrape want to gather a sizable amount of data that can’t be collected manually in a short timeframe.

Web scraping is a common approach to collecting data. After receiving the data through web scraping, the analyzing process begins, and the data is organized and curated for different use cases. Legal web scraping is about retrieving public web data that is freely accessible; it does not refer to accessing private data from the web.

Some websites tend to prevent web scraping with bot detection methods to preserve server resources for actual users. Due to this, the web scraping process can get tedious if you don’t utilize the most advanced techniques and tools.

How Web Scraping Works

The web scraping process has 5 main stages, and includes sending an HTTP request, receiving the server’s response, parsing the HTML document, executing JavaScript for dynamic content, and storing the data in efficient structures.

1. HTTP Request

When you specify the webpage URL to scrape, the web scraping tool sends an HTTP request to the web server. This is a GET request for retrieving data, but occasionally, it can be a POST request for submitting data, such as when filling out a website form.

2. Server Response

The server will receive the request and process it. The web server will send back an HTTP response. The response includes a status code indicating whether the request was successful. For unsuccessful requests, you can see error messages such as “403 Forbidden” or “404 Not Found”. The successful requests will include the HTML content of the requested webpage.

3. Parsing Process

The HTML document is challenging to navigate; hence, parsing is required. HTML parsing can be done using different libraries such as BeautifulSoup and Cheerio. This helps you better navigate the HTML content’s Document Object Model (DOM) tree and locate the specific data you want.

4. Handling Dynamic Content

If you want to scrape modern websites that utilize JavaScript to load content dynamically, the data you need won’t be available through the initial HTML response. To access the data on these websites, web data scraping tools and bots use techniques like headless browsers to execute JavaScript and extract the dynamically loaded content.

5. Data Storage

Lastly, you have to store the data in a clean and structured way to analyze the data effectively. Web scraping tools can remove unwanted characters from the data and convert it into a consistent and manageable format, like a table or list. Then, you can store the data in a usable format, such as SQL databases, Excel files, JSON files, and more.

Different Types of Web Scrapers

Self-built Scrapers, Browser Extensions, and Cloud-based scrapers are the 3 types of scrapers available to users today.

1. Self-built Scrapers: The most flexible type of Web Scrapers are self-built scrapers. These custom-built programs or scripts can be easily integrated with other programs and handle large-scale web scraping. There are many web scraping frameworks that you can employ to build a suitable scraper for your needs.
2. Browser Extension: If you’re looking for a user-friendly and lightweight scraping tool, web scraping or screen scraping browser extensions are a good choice. The setup is quick, it’s easy to use, and doesn’t require any coding. However, these types of scrapers are designed for small amounts of data extraction and have limited capabilities.
3. Cloud-based: Many web scraping services are cloud-based and run on remote servers. The setup for these web scraping solutions is easy, and they offer advanced features like CAPTCHA solving and data storage. However, you need to pay a subscription cost to access the tools.

What Is Web Scraping Used for?

There are 12 main reasons to use a web scraper.

1. Price Comparison: Collecting and comparing the prices of products and services from e-commerce sites helps individuals find the best deals, and companies can stay ahead of their competitors by offering the most affordable price.
2. Lead Generation: Gathering leads from websites, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, can help businesses find their target audience and plan marketing campaigns.
3. Market Research: Extracting data on consumer behavior, market trends, and competitor analysis provides valuable insights for companies. This helps them make accurate business decisions, business intelligence strategies, and product development plans.
4. News Aggregation: News aggregation sites like Google News scrape headlines and articles from multiple sources.
5. Academic Research: Research requires large datasets, and website scraping can quickly provide them. Content aggregation from online databases and social media is helpful to academic researchers.
6. Real Estate: Collecting data on property prices, locations, and listings is a routine procedure for real estate agents. This enables users to find the best property based on different factors. It also helps real estate platforms find more customers and track market trends.
7. Financial Data: Scraping market news, financial statements, and stock prices benefit investors. Financial analysts make investment decisions and enhance their risk management strategy based on the data scraped from various websites.
8. Sentiment Analysis: Gauging sentiment around different factors of a product, service, event, or a certain topic through web scraping can lead to improved marketing strategies and meaningful communication with the audience.
9. Email Marketing: Collecting email addresses of potential customers from various websites is one of web scraping’s most common uses. With this approach, businesses can quickly build target audience email lists and elevate the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.
10. Brand Monitoring: Managing a brand’s reputation is crucial to stay ahead of competitors. Analyzing overall public opinion about the brand and studying product reviews can be used for brand management purposes and help businesses respond to customer feedback.
11. Business Automation: Another benefit of web scraping is streamlining repetitive business processes and tasks like content monitoring, data entry, and reporting. This can significantly save businesses time and resources.
12. MAP Monitoring: Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) monitoring refers to the process of tracking how products are priced across different platforms and retailers. If a partner retailer sells the product below the agreed price, the company can easily find out by using web scraping and taking the proper action.

Is Web Scraping Legal?

The act of web scraping is legal, but you need to be careful about what you scrape. If the information is protected by terms of service or international regulations, scraping such information will lead to legal issues. Here are the legal and ethical considerations of web scraping:

1. Website Terms of Service

Some websites prohibit automated scraping in their Terms of Service (ToS) agreements. Always check the Terms of Service before starting the web scraping process. Violating these agreements, in some cases, could lead to legal consequences.

2. Data Privacy Regulations

Laws and regulations vary from region to region, and some countries have strict rules for collecting personal data. For example, in the European Union, based on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), scraping personal data can result in significant fines.

3. Copyright Laws

Ensure that your data scraping process doesn’t involve violating copyright laws. Scraping and publishing copyrighted content from websites without permission is illegal. However, scraping copyrighted content is considered fair use for research and education.

4. Ethical Practices

Avoid using malicious scrapers or bots that can overwhelm servers with excessive requests to scrap private data. If the tool is scraping private information, immediately stop the process. Even if you can’t find a strict regulation against your specific web scraping approach, a website owner or user can identify you and take legal action for malicious web scraping.

Common Challenges of Web Scraping

Web scraping faces challenges such as dynamic content handling, CAPTCHA-solving, IP blocking, website updates and changes, and JavaScript rendering.

• Handling Dynamic Content: Modern websites employ JavaScript to load the content dynamically. As a result, the initial HTML document doesn’t provide the desired data. A basic web scraping bot can’t be used in this case. As a solution, scrapers use headless browsers or JavaScript scraping frameworks to access the content.
• CAPTCHAs and Anti-Scraping Measures: Websites employ various anti-scraping measures, such as CAPTCHAs, to prevent bot access. CAPTCHAs are evolving; nowadays, they are much more than simple input of numbers and letters. These advanced measures hinder web scraping, so you need to use suitable tools like CAPTCHA solver APIs to access the protected websites.
• IP Blocking and Rate Limiting: Excessive scraping from a single IP address can trigger IP blocking and rate limiting from websites. Hence, users take advantage of proxies and IP rotation features to access the website with another IP address.
• Website Structure Changes: Websites frequently update their structure and HTML/CSS code, which can disrupt web scraping. Using flexible scraping tools can only minimize the effects of these changes and not eliminate them.
• JavaScript Rendering: Websites that utilize JavaScript frameworks, like Angular, often render content on the client side. So, a simple HTTP request won’t provide the full content. Headless browsers and dynamic scraping libraries can handle JavaScript rendering and deal with modern JavaScript frameworks.

Web scraping is not without its challenges, and these obstacles are becoming increasingly complex with advances in website security measures and new technologies for IP blocks.

Can I Use ChatGPT to Scrape Website?

Yes, you can use ChatGPT to scrape a website. However, the standard version of ChatGPT can’t handle Web Scraping requests. With a “Scraper” plugin, ChatGPT gains scraping capabilities. To use this plugin, you need to subscribe to the paid version of ChatGPT.

Installing the Scraper plugin won’t be enough if you want to scrape a website with a complex structure or anti-scraping measures. In these situations, you have to use the ChatGPT Code Interpreter. For this, you must download the source HTML, upload it to the Code Interpreter, and ask the AI to scrape the data. You can use our ChatGPT guide for web scraping and follow the listed steps to successfully scrape using ChatGPT.

Future Trends in Web Scraping

API-based scraping, AI/ML, Open-source, and Cloud-based solutions are the future trends of web scraping.

• API-Based Scraping: The trend of API-first designs for websites is on the rise. Compared to traditional HTML scraping, API (Application Programming Interface) scraping is more efficient.
• AI and Machine Learning: With the rise of Artificial Intelligence tools, some technologies can automatically identify and extract data from websites. Furthermore, Machine Learning models are becoming more accurate at recognizing web content patterns.
• Open Source Scraping Tools: Many open-source communities are constantly developing advanced web scraping tools and libraries. As more AI scraping tools are created and big tech teams are less likely to develop bots, the open-source communities will likely grow, and we can expect more collaborations and tools to be accessible to everyone.
• Cloud-Based Services: With the advancements in web scraping technologies, many cloud-based platforms like Bright Data emerge and offer services that simplify the process. These platforms have started taking advantage of AI. Expect to see more services with advanced AI tools and real-time scraping capabilities in the future.

Popular Web Scraping Tools

Bright Data, Oxylabs, ScrapingBee, and Octaparse are popular web scraping tools among developers, marketers, and business owners.