For instance, if you would visit the websites containing information you are interested in and copy and paste the needed data manually, it would take a lot of time. Collecting data this way is more efficient. In most cases, the information the organization seeks to obtain is gathered with the help of specific applications called web scrapers. Such as information related to the industry or data associated with the company's clients, competitors, and so on. Web scraping might be used in marketing, financing, and many other industries that may have a need to analyze data from different web pages. How and why companies employ web scraping? This method is often used for creating an easily searchable index or a database which, for example, could be used to build a search engine. During this process, applications called crawlers locate and follow all hyperlinks the collected websites contain. As for the so-called web crawling, it is when all of the targeted web pages' data is being downloaded automatically. However, due to the potential security risks of web scraping, it is considered to be a controversial method. In other words, it can make it possible to mine lots of different pieces of data, such as weather reports or market pricing from various websites.
It also says, the data collection process is usually done while using software that gathers various pieces of information from different websites by simulating user browsing behavior.
According to, web scraping is a term used to describe the variety of methods used for collecting information from the Internet. Web scraping can be confused with web crawling, but in reality, they are entirely different things.