Scrape

TL;DR

Scrape is a term that represents the extraction of data from a website. This job is carried out by a code which is called “scraper”. The data can be represented by text, photos, videos, contact information or product items.

About Scrape

Scrape, also named web scraping or web data extraction is the technique of retrieving large amounts of data from a website. This process is followed by saving data on a computer or in a database in a table format. 

Even the scraping can be done manually, usually, automated tools are used when scraping web data because it’s a faster and less costly process.

Web scraping is essentially a form of data extracting. Items like weather reports, market pricing, or any other list of collected data can be found in web scraping efforts.

When is scrape used?

Usually, web scraping is used when search engine bots crawl a site for analyzing it or ranking it, when price comparison deploying bots are done or when market research companies use scrapers to pull data from forums.

How does it work?

All the job is carried out by a scraper, which is a piece of code. 

In the first step, it sends a “get” code query to the website it wants to be scraped. It can be configured to work with any website, or it can be built for a specific website. 

Then, web scraping software will automatically load and extract data from multiple pages of websites based on the requirement. 

After this, it defines an HTML  document based on the results of the query. 

In the final step, the requested data is searched in the document by the scrapers and the results are converted in a document specified by the user before. With a simple click of a button, the data available on the website can be saved easily.