Web Crawling v/s Web Scraping – The Key Differences to Understand

Anyone looking for a way to get bulk public data will have to take the help of web crawling or web scraping. As these two are overlapping terms, many of us consider them the same. However, they are poles apart despite aiming at the same goal or working in the same direction on various fronts.

Clarity about these two terms is crucial when gathering data for your organization to ensure you use the right data collection tactic. Let’s explore their meanings, differences, and other essential aspects.

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Web Crawling v/s Web Scraping – Understand The Basics

Let’s start by learning the meaning of these two terms.

Web scraping

Web scraping is the process of gathering or extracting public internet data and saving it on a device. The collected data is mainly stored in CSV and Excel spreadsheets. It is both manual and automatic. However, manual web scraping is erroneous, limited, and tiresome.

Automatic web scraping is done with bots, scrapers, and APIs. It helps seize vast amounts of data, requires little human effort, and can collect massive amounts of data. The prime focus of web extraction is to make an organization data-rich to leverage sales, marketing, and market penetration. However, web scraping is also used for internal growth.

Web scraping is possible in many ways. For instance, you can outsource this service, use a web scraping API, and create your own web scraper to fetch customized data. Web scraping comprises two parts: a crawler and a scraper.

Web Crawling

It is the process of reading and storing the intended content with the help of a bot. There is no human involvement. This is done for indexing and archiving purposes. Search engines primarily use this process. They crawl the website and index it according to the amount and quality of content.

In short, scraping involves pulling or extracting data, while crawling involves following each website link to determine its content.

Examples of Both

Simply telling you about facts won’t help much. Learning with examples is best. Hence, we present you examples of both these techniques.

Imagine you’re exploring the world of home automation and stumble upon a blog. If you were to extract the information from that blog, create a new document, and save it, you’d engage in web scraping, a technique relevant to your web development and SEO interests.

The best example of web crawling is a search engine like Google or Bing. Both use spider bots to crawl all the internet data. They go through every website on the internet for indexing purposes. They look for specific keywords in the content and index the page accordingly to improve the relevancy of the search results.

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Web Crawling v/s Web Scraping – The Key Similarities

The main similarity between these two techniques is that they both deal with data and use it for good purposes. Also, they both can be done on a large scale. And, when done on a large scale, both will be done automatically. As mentioned above, web crawling is part of web scraping. They both are legal as long as you have your hands on public data. They both use robot.txt to access the data.

That’s it. Similarities between these two end here.

Web Crawling v/s Web Scraping – The Key Differences

Let’s talk about the differences between these two shares.

The Aim

Web scraping allows users to extract public data, making them data-rich. Web crawling helps search engines rank a web page. At the individual level, crawling refers to going through a website’s links and finding out what content is on it. Its prime goal is to help users get to know the website better.

The Scope

Speaking of the reach or extent to which these activities can be performed, we have to tell you that web scraping can be done at any scale, small or large. In fact, an individual can do it for specific purposes, while web crawling is done only on a large scale.

There is quite interesting information that we get from here. As per the discussion, scraping is targeted and requires extensive coding. It will look for a particular data set on a website. However, crawling doesn’t demand extensive coding skills and is general. It will not follow. Instead, it will go through every link and pay attention to every piece of information present on the website.

You need a web scraper for scraping and a crawler to crawl the internet. Scraper is highly advanced and is way ahead of crawlers. For instance, it will have regard for robots.txt, will be able to hide from the browser, act like a user, and work stealthily.

The Development

Building a web scraper is a more tedious job than building a web crawler. In web scraper, if you have to be extensively involved in coding. However, the #NoCode movement is now promoting the use of tools that require minimum coding. Web scraper is also possible with no or minimal coding. Still, it’s an extensive job. You have multiple ways to build a scraper. For instance, you can use Python or Excel for scraping. API usage for web scraping is also on the boom.

Building a crawler is relatively easy. You have to add the URLs you want to visit, copy a link from the URL, and add it to the Visited URL thread. This is the base of web crawler development. There are further steps to follow. But, coding is less.

Is it too much information to grasp? Have a look at this table.

Conclusion

If you want to use public internet data for your own good, understanding the differences between web scraping and web crawling is a must. Scraping is public data collection while crawling is gauging website data. The post did a considerable job of making things clear and provided substantial facts about web crawling v/s web scraping. If you’ve got a few points to share, do it right away in the comments section.

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