understanding web scraping

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites using bots, it involves fetching contents from a web page by programmatically checking through to check on the specific information required, which may include text, image, price, url and titles.

NOTE
Web scraping must be done responsibly, respecting terms of service and legal guidelines, as some websites restrict data extraction.

APPLICATION OF WEB SCRAPING

• E-commerce- to monitor price trends and product availability among competitors

• Market research – when carrying our research by gathering customer reviews and behavior patterns

• Lead generation - this involves extracting data from certain directories to build targeted outreach list

• News and financial data – To gather up-to-date news, trends in the financial market to develop financial insights.

• Academic research – Gathering data for analysis studies

TOOLS FOR WEB SCRAPING
The tools for webs craping helps and makes it easier to gather information from the websites and often automates the data extraction process.

TOOL	DESCRIPTION	APPLICATION	BEST USED FOR
BeautifulSoup	Python library for parsing HTML and XML	Extracting content from static web pages, such as HTML tags and structured data tables	Projects that don’t need browsers interaction
Selenium	Browser automation tool that interacts with dynamic websites, filling forms, clicking buttons and handling javas cript content.	Extracting content from sites that require user interaction Scraping content generated by java script	Complex dynamic pages that offer infinite scroll
Scrapy	An open-source, python-based framework designed specifically for web scraping	Large-scale scraping projects and data pipelines	Crawling multiple pages, creating datasets from large websites and scraping structured data
Octoparse	A no-code tool with a drag-and-drop interface for building scraping workflows	Data collection for users without programming skills, especially for web pages that has job listings or social media profiles.	Quick data collection with no-code workflows
ParseHub	A visual extraction tool for scraping from dynamic websites using AI to understand and collect data from complex layouts	Scrapping data from AJAX-based websites, dashboards and interactive charts	Non-technical users who want to scrap data from complex, javascript-heavy websites.
Puppeteer	A Node.js library that provides high-level API to control chrome over the DevTools Protocol	Capturing and scraping dynamic java Script content, taking screenshots, generating PDFs and automated browser testing	Java script-heavy websites, especially when server-side data extraction is needed
Apify	A cloud-based scraping platform with an extensive library of ready made scraping tools, plus support for custom scripts.	Collecting large datasets or scrapping from multiple sources	Enterprise-level web scraping tasks that require scaling and automation

You can combine multiple tools in one project if needed

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