Web scraping is a technique used to extract large amounts of data from websites automatically. It involves using bots that mimic human behavior to surf the web and gather information from web pages programmatically.
Some key aspects of web scraping:
- Web scrapers or bots follow links and analyze HTML/CSS to extract structured data like product details, reviews, phone numbers, addresses etc.
- They save retrieved data to local databases for further analysis using programming languages like Python.
- Scraping is done within legal and ethical boundaries to gather only publicly available information.
- It is useful for lead generation, market research, price comparison and analyzing website content changes over time.
- Effective scraping requires understanding webpage structures and dynamic elements that require rendering complete JavaScript.
- Anti-scraping measures include imposing download limits, detecting bots through CAPTCHAs or blocking suspicious IP addresses.
- Scraped data may then be used for SEO, marketing automation, price monitoring or supplemented with additional data sources.
So in summary, web scraping is an automated way to collect bulk unstructured online data at scale for analytics and insights.