What is Web scraping ?
Web scraping in a few worlds
Web scraping is the process of data extraction from the site.
You can also hear the next terms :
- web scraping
- web harvesting
- web data extraction
Example of the information we need
Imagine that we have some product in the Ebay store. And we would like to collect the next fields :
- category
- title
- price
- shipping price
- and so on
It’s not difficult to copy-paste this data. But what if we need 100 products, 1 000 products, 1 000 000 products. How much time will you spend to copy-paste this data ? Scraping does it for you.
Pre-scraping process
Actually when we start site’s scraping we don’t know all the pages that we need to scrap. The process of the pages’ searching/indexation calls web crawling.
Imagine we already have the list of the pages we want to scrap. In this case we’ll scrap page by page from the list and try to find the list of fields we are interested in.
Scrap the page
To scrap the page we need to know the selectors we are looking for. In Scraper.biz we call the set of selectors the Extraction model.
With this selectors we can simply know the fields we want to find on the every page. The extraction of this data from pages calls scraping.
Thank you for your attention
Thank you for your attention. If you have any question or advice please feel free to contact me. I‘ll be glad to help you.
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