By Vishal Basumatary in Web scraping — Jan 8, 2023

Web Scraping and Web Crawling: What's the Difference?

When it comes to web scraping and web crawling, there’s a lot of confusion on the difference between the two. Both web scraping and web crawling are used in order to collect data from webpages, however there are significant differences between them.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites. It is a technology that allows you to extract data from websites and organize it into a structured format such as a CSV, Excel or JSON file. Web scraping is done using automated scripts, or “bots”, that are programmed to go to a website, locate the data to be extracted, and then store it in a structured format.

What is Web Crawling?

Web crawling is the process of navigating through a website and gathering the data it contains. This is done by a web crawler, or “spider”, that is programmed to visit web pages, follow links, and collect data. The data collected by the web crawler is then stored in a database for later analysis.

Difference between Web Scraping and Web Crawling

The main difference between web scraping and web crawling is the way in which the data is collected. Web scraping requires an automated script to extract the data, while web crawling requires a web crawler to follow links and collect the data.

Web scraping is often used to collect large amounts of data from a specific website. This data can be used for a variety of purposes such as market research, price comparison, or website analytics. Web crawling is often used to index websites, and is used by search engines such as Google to discover new web pages.

Pros and Cons

Pros: Web scraping and web crawling are both effective ways to collect data from a website, and are used by many companies for a variety of purposes.
Cons: Both web scraping and web crawling require an automated script or web crawler, which can be difficult to create. This can lead to increased costs in development and maintenance.

Conclusion

Web scraping and web crawling are both powerful tools for collecting data from webpages. While web scraping is used to collect large amounts of data from a specific website, web crawling is used to index websites and discover new web pages. Both techniques require an automated script or web crawler, which can be difficult to create and maintain.