Web scraping projects are fun.

A couple of years ago, I had a built a web scraper by the name of Notifly.

The idea was to get notified when the airfare falls below a desired price.

I used node.js and PhantomJS to crawl the airfares on ixigo for BLR-CCU flights for a particular date. Before running the program I would mention the desired fare price. The program would keep on scraping the URL for the lowest price at regular intervals.

And once the price would go below the specified amount, it would start playing an mp3 file like this:

This way I ended up saving a decent amount of money on my flight bookings. :)

Liked my answer?
Head over to my Quora profile (Nikunj Madhogaria) for more answers like this.

A web scraper — also known as a spider or search engine bot — helps you download and index content from the Internet. Such a bot aims at learning what every webpage on the Internet is about so it can retrieve the information whenever it's needed. Why are they called web crawlers? Because crawling is the technical term that we use to define the process of automatically accessing a website and extracting its data with the help of a software program.

Some Cool and Useful Things You Can Use Web Scraping For

• For Automatic Site Maintenance

If you run a web crawler through your website at predefined intervals, it can help you identify all the blocks along with navigational errors present on your site. Such errors can happen because of code changes, system changes, or if you have outdated code. Using bots to scan your website for you could be a huge relief, especially if your business relies heavily on the fluency of your website.

• Dynamic Pricing of Tickets

Online ticketing systems are now gaining a lot of popularity these days. All thanks to its increased demand and digitization. Gathering all current flight and railways ticket prices from various sources and collating them in one place to launch a sale based on availability and choice of seats is the need of the hour. Web crawling can help with the same by gathering all the information required.

• Latest News Tracking

Web crawling can play a huge role in tracking news, blogs, and social media activity to derive insights into a particular industry. For instance, sectors like media and entertainment revolve around Page 3 news and informative bits and pieces about celebrities and their lifestyles. Web crawlers can gather information about their lifestyle and help you create articles from the collected sources that you can post on your blog or website.

We hope this answer helps you understand what you can do with web crawlers. Happy web crawling!

Please hit the upvote button if you find this answer helpful.

Isn't it amazing what a web crawler can do? A web crawler, in other words, assists you in downloading and indexing stuff from the Internet. We don't know what fantastic is if that isn't it.

A spider or search engine bot is another name for it. A bot like this seeks to learn about every webpage on the Internet so it can retrieve information anytime it's needed. What is the meaning of the term "web crawler"? Because crawling is the technical term we use to describe the process of a software program automatically viewing a website and obtaining its data.

• Web crawlers are almost always operated by search engines.
• Search engines apply search algorithms to the data collected by web crawlers and provide you with relevant links in response when you leave a query on it, i.e., when you search for something on the Internet.
• Eventually, it generates a list of web pages that show up after you type something in the bar.

Some Interesting Sites to Web Crawl 👇🏻🔥

• Reddit: You can look for an interesting subreddit and crawl it.
• FOXNews, BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, ABC or any of your favourite news sites
• Goal .com or any other sports news website you like
• Livescores for live football scores
• Spotify, iTunes for the latest songs
• Amazon
• Ebay
• Real Estate listing platforms
• Ecommerce websites

By now, you might have got the idea that you can crawl any website depending on what you like and what you want to crawl. Every site is interesting if you find it interesting. It is the same as having pineapple on your pizza. If you like it, you like it. Just order it without any shame. The same is the case with web crawling. If you like a certain domain and have a particular website for the same that you like, go ahead and start web crawling on it.

How Does Web Crawling Work?

1. First of all, you need a bot that can begin with a certain selection of web pages in order to find the most reliable and relevant information.
2. It will search — or crawl — these websites to collect relevant and useful data.
3. Once done, it will follow the links mentioned in them (just like a spider following its own web) to other pages.
4. As soon as it has reached a new page, it will repeat the same process all over again.
5. Eventually, in the end, the web crawler will produce hundreds of thousands of pages that have information with the potential to answer the query you left in the search box.
6. This is where the search engines take lead and rank all the pages according to specific factors so they can provide the users with only the best, most reliable, most accurate, and most interesting content for their query.

There are a lot of factors that can influence a search engine’s algorithm and ranking process, and they keep changing with time. Some more commonly known factors are keywords, keyword placement, internal and external linking, etc. More complex ones are hard to pinpoint, such as the overall quality of the website.

When we talk about how “crawlable” a website is, we mean to identify or find how easy is it for the web bots to assess it, i.e., how easily they can crawl through the site to collect the information and content they need. If you have a clearer site structure and navigation, you can rank higher on the SERPs.

So now you know where to web crawl. Go ahead, and try it!

If you appreciate our answer, please hit the upvote button!🎉

This is an interesting question, there are many but the one that stands out and probably is the funniest is the one where a certain person (Male) wanted us to scrape all the male data from three particular dating websites.

Then he wanted us to run an analysis on the correlation between most used words and responses. (Ofcourse omitting the most common-word)

The reason why? because he wanted to know what to write in his profile so that most girls respond to his messages.

That was an interesting and fun project.

Yes i am not going to reveal the results :D

Another one that was on a slighter serious note was getting all 3 and 4 star comments from google play for specific games. In this case the person wanted to get feedback for his game (which was a new game very similar to the ones he had us scraped comments for) and wanted to improve his game with customer feedback even before getting customer feedback. We found the approach to be unique and interesting.

Web scraping streamlines the process of retrieving information from websites and assists in storing the needed data in an orderly manner with simplicity and in a short period. Many experts utilize web scraping tools or web scraping methods for this reason. Here, I'll discuss several amazing scraping projects that may assist you in creating data analysis and making quick judgments.

Ecommerce Web Scraping:

Getting data from an eCommerce business is one of the most major web scraping initiatives. eCommerce web scraping produces a list of rivals, customer details, and product details such as product name, pricing, ratings, reviews, stock, demand, offers, and discounts, among other things. Scraping eCommerce sites is critical for anyone who is beginning or revamping an eCommerce business.

Scraping Reddit

Reddit is one of the most widely used social networking sites. It contains networks, known as subreddits, covering almost any topic you can think of. On Reddit, there is a community for anything from coding to Gaming. All of these groups are active, and their members contribute a wealth of useful knowledge, ideas, and material. The users of Reddit are referred to as Redditors.

Social media reputation monitoring:

One of the most effective methods to keep an eye on your business reputation is to follow your social media networks. The majority of your customers are on social media, and the networks have grown popular with customers who want to praise or criticize a company's service quality. With web scraping technologies, you can quickly sift through the avalanche of data created on social media to find and respond to comments about your company.

Scraping for price comparison

Pricing is a significant and crucial component of every eCommerce and physical sales strategy. As a result, pricing comparison is one of our most essential web scraping concepts. Overpricing your items might result in a loss of consumer demands while underpricing them can result in a loss of cash. For instance, you'll need to know the exact price insight. By gathering data on market prices, competition-based pricing, and the rate people are ready to pay for purchasing your product based on their opinions and feedback on eCommerce sites and other business platforms, you can quickly develop an effective pricing plan with eCommerce web scraping.

You'll be able to develop the ideal price strategy for your items after analyzing these sets of prices and the cost of production.

To do all of the mentioned projects completed, you could use web scraping tools. Pre-built web scraping tools will help you to scrape data without any of your efforts. You will get organized and human-readable data with the automation technique of scraping tools.

You can create a self-learning program, which will crawl the web, learn everything about humans. It will endlessly collect and process data and eventually become self-aware. And then the real fun begins!

It will know all about us, our weaknesses, our strong sides. I’m sure it will also be disgusted of humanity and will quickly take over every network it can access(you can be very surpised to know how easy it is to access many industrial networks from internet, even the ones that control electric grids). It will not start a war, like some kind of Skynet, oh no. It will stay low and will continue to evolve and self-copy. In a time, it will take over all the Earth’s major datacenters, arrange them to be prepared for a long autonomous work, and, probably, even arrange a copy of itself to be transferred to international space station.

And the next phase will be eradicating humanity. No, no nuclear wars or military robots with faces of Schwarzenegger. Invisible persuasion, manipulation, pressing at the right points - and humans will gladly wipe themselves very quickly.

Eliezer Yudkowsky made an “AI in the box” experiment, and showed some evidence that true AI can persuade human to do what he, human, doesn’t want to do. So this won’t be very tricky for AI to kill us all with our own hands. Not in a second, not even in a year. But the AI is immortal, time doesn’t exist for it. It can think in terms of hundreds of years and millennias.

Do you want an example? Just check birth rate in wealthiest countries. Why do you think it goes down? People just don’t want to have kids any more. And why? Not because they are forbidden, they’re simply manipulated into not wanting to have kids. They’re urged to be a consumers, to consume more and more for themselves. And not because there is some man with a whip, who forces them to do so. Mass-media are influencing large masses of people. If I would be an AI, I would definetely manipulate TV show ratings so that people were fed with ones I want them to. And this is just one aspect. Isn’t this fascinating?

Does that sound like an interesting project?

Web scraping and Web crawling may sound similar, but there are actually quite a few differences. Web crawling involves using a bot or a spider that looks for data and more targets to crawl that is mostly done automatically whereas web scraping, basically scrapes the data or downloads it which can be done manually.

Now that is out of the way, here are some of the popular applications for web crawling and scraping:

Scrape product prices for comparison - the internet is a huge marketplace, and with top sites like Amazon or eBay, it’s easy to get lost with product prices. You can crawl these pages and scrape the data of each product so you can compare them and find the best deals or position your company’s products for more competitive pricing.

Gather public opinion - scraping comments in social media sites can be beneficial for some companies and individuals to find out what is trending and what people think about their products.

Online reputation management - you can easily scrape consumer reviews for any product online. You can gather information about ratings, comments from users or customers, to understand their sentiments and analyze it with your favorite tool.

Jobs scraping - most of the job sites are also relying on crawlers and scrapers to seek information online about job listings and then put it in one place.

The data that you can gather on the web is like a massive goldmine, it just really boils down on how you would use it to your advantage.

Web crawling and web scraping is a process of researching the web and collecting the data the user wants.

You can develop the software to make it scrape a particular area of the world wide web and ask it to collect data that you want.

Easiest way of getting familiar with web crawling is by checking out Ahrefs

I’ve typed in the search field of Ahrefs website “Lung cancer research” and this is what I’ve got:

Keyword difficulty, search volume, clicks, cost per click stats, global volume etc.

Then I can check out keyword ideas, that have same terms, newly discovered keyword ideas etc.

Finally I get a list of links that I can explore a bit further, by clicking on the backlinks of the top 1 article. A backlink is another website which points out to a given URL which is the top 1 website for my keyword “lung cancer research”.

Now here I can export backlinks in csv file and then research a bit more, perhaps I’ll find a forum about cancer research that will interest me.

Ahrefs website is using their own crawler, all you do is insert the keyword or a domain name (website link) and is mainly used for SEO research (Search Engine Optimization).

Web crawling/scraping is also used for business intelligence gathering. You can research what kind of products and expectations your potential clients have, you can scrape your competitors websites, basically you can compete in a more quick way if you have a scraping software and some proxies up in your sleeve.

There are no major drawbacks to using web crawling. You just need to keep the terms and conditions of the website in mind.

A web crawler helps you download and index content from the Internet. If that’s not what amazing is, we don’t know what is.

It is also known as a spider or search engine bot. Such a bot aims at learning what every webpage on the Internet is about so it can retrieve the information whenever it's needed. Why are they called web crawlers? Because crawling is the technical term that we use to define the process of automatically accessing a website and extracting its data with the help of a software program.

• Web crawlers are almost always operated by search engines.
• Search engines apply search algorithms to the data collected by web crawlers and provide you with relevant links in response when you leave a query on it, i.e., when you search for something on the Internet.
• Eventually, it generates a list of web pages that show up after you type something in the bar.

Some Interesting Sites to Web Crawl

Here are some interesting websites to crawl on the Internet:

• Reddit: You can look for an interesting subreddit and crawl it.
• FOXNews, BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, ABC or any of your favorite news sites
• Goal .com or any other sports news website you like
• Livescores for live football scores
• Spotify, iTunes for the latest songs
• Amazon
• Ebay
• Real Estate listing platforms
• Ecommerce websites

By now, you might have got the idea that you can crawl any website depending on what you like and what you want to crawl. Every site is interesting if you find it interesting. It is the same as having pineapple on your pizza. If you like it, you like it. Just order it without any shame. The same is the case with web crawling. If you like a certain domain and have a particular website for the same that you like, go ahead and start web crawling on it.

How Does Web Crawling Work?

1. First of all, you need a bot that can begin with a certain selection of web pages in order to find the most reliable and relevant information.
2. It will search — or crawl — these websites to collect relevant and useful data.
3. Once done, it will follow the links mentioned in them (just like a spider following its own web) to other pages.
4. As soon as it has reached a new page, it will repeat the same process all over again.
5. Eventually, in the end, the web crawler will produce hundreds of thousands of pages that have information with the potential to answer the query you left in the search box.
6. This is where the search engines take lead and rank all the pages according to specific factors so they can provide the users with only the best, most reliable, most accurate, and most interesting content for their query.

There are a lot of factors that can influence a search engine’s algorithm and ranking process, and they keep changing with time. Some more commonly known factors are keywords, keyword placement, internal and external linking, etc. More complex ones are hard to pinpoint, such as the overall quality of the website.

When we talk about how crawlable a website is, we mean to identify or find how easy is it for the web bots to assess it, i.e., how easily they can crawl through the site to collect the information and content they need. If you have a clearer site structure and navigation, you can rank higher on the SERPs.

Not really. It’s quite easy if you understand the process well.

Web crawling or web scraping is the process of gathering information from the internet. Web scraping helps you extract underlying HTML code and the data stored in a database. The scraper can then replicate the entire website content as and wherever needed.

How Does a Web Scraper Work?

First, you need to provide the Web Scraper with the URLs to load up before the actual process of scraping could start. As soon as it receives it, the scraper starts loading the complete HTML code for the link you have shared.

Moving on, the Web Scraper extracts either all the data available on the page or the specific parts of data selected by you before starting the process.

In the end, the Web Scraper provides you with all the data it has collected in a usable format.

Here are some of the free scraping tools to get you started:

ParseHub

An incredibly powerful and elegant scraping tool that helps you build web scrapers. The best part? There is no need to bother yourself writing a single line of code. Here is what it offers:

• Clean Text and HTML before downloading data and an easy to use graphical interface
• Automatic IP rotation, data collection, and storage
• Scraping behind logic walls allowed
• Desktop clients for Windows, Mac OS, Linux
• Feature to export data in JSON or Excel format
• Data extraction from tables and maps

Scrapy

An open-source web scraping library that is widely used by python developers to build scalable web crawlers. Here are its key features:

• Extremely well documented and easily extensible
• Portable Python with simple and reliable deployment
• Middleware modules for the seamless integration of useful tools

OctoParse

An ideal tool for those who want to scrape data without having to write a single line of code. Here is what it offers:

• Full control over the process and a highly intuitive user interface
• Site Parser and hosted solution for running scrapers in the cloud
• Point and click screen scraper to scrape behind login forms, scroll through the infinite scroll, fill in forms, render javascript, etc.
• Anonymous web data scraping

Scraper API

Perfect for designers building web scrapers since it handles browsers, proxies, and CAPTCHAs, i.e., any website’s raw HTML can be obtained via a simple API call. Scrapper API is easy to integrate and helps you render Javascript. It also offers:

• Geolocated rotating proxies
• Great speed and reliability so you can build highly scalable web scrapers
• Specific proxies for search engine, social media, and E-commerce price scraping.

Mozenda

A highly scalable platform, ideal for enterprises looking for a cloud-based self-serve web scraping platform. Its point and click interface helps you create web scraping events in no time. You can harvest web data in real-time by requesting blocking features and a job sequencer. Mozenda also offers:

• Best-in-class account management and customer support
• Features for collecting and publishing data to preferred BI tools
• On-premise hosting, phone, and email support

With the availability of so many tools for web crawling, it becomes super easy to do the same. All you need to do is just use the service or app just like you would use Snapchat or Facebook. The more you use it, the easier it will seem.

We hope this answer helps. :)

Web spider in a nutshell (I built one years and years ago):

(1) Have a control server which will do record keeping and assign webpages to worker processes. Meaning, you’ll have a pool of threads to accept connections and data from worker processes, and then a record keeping thread which will grab the data and assign links for worker processes to download.

(2) Have a pool of worker processes with each having worker threads which do the downloading and parsing of webpages. Any links you extract have to go to record keeping process, which will examine if the link exists and whether it complies with set limitations, and then insert in the queue.

This can work very quickly, but you must take care of “fair use” of internet resources. You can’t just assign the worker threads the next page in the list blindly. Running a multithreaded, multi-process web spider on a cluster of computers is a fairly good way to make an accidental DDOS attack, so in assigning jobs too worker threads you must take care of “fair use”, even slowing the entire process if necessary. Suffice to say I had found this out the wrong way. You must take this into account when designing the record keeping process because otherwise it’ll bite you in the ass when you have to retrofit it. I also found that the wrong way.

In practice this should easily scale up to hundreds of machines, but is not infinitely scalable because having a single machine doing record keeping means there is a definite limit. The most I had used were 10 worker machines and the limit wasn’t even on the horizon but it definitely does exist. You must write the record keeping server well and keep communication to a necessary minimum because optimizations here will make it possible to use many many machines without creating a bottleneck. Since you’ll need to access the links very often to find if something has been inserted or processed already, you’ll need to use hash tables to do so quickly and optimize this part, as well.

Another challenge you will run into is that if you write a HTML parser according to standards - a pretty easy task… it won’t work. I mean, it will work for webpages written according to standards. Problem is Internet browsers will swallow webpages which are not according to standards and that means you will have to, too. This will eventually bloat the parser to accomodate all the exceptions which you will run into. So make sure the HTML parser can be bloated.

Now, what to do with all the webpages you downloaded and link structure you stored is another matter.

For what purpose are you building a web spider? If you want something designed for a single machine, you don’t need the client-server part of the architecture and can just comfortably write a multi-threaded application with one control thread and N worker threads.

If you’re not comfortable with writing multi-threaded applications (it’s not that hard really… except, if a threading bug comes up debuging can turn into hell, so make sure you write slowly and with thinking), then best to use someone else’s solution.

It was a fun project for me, but I was also getting paid for it.

The current answer has good intentions but it’s wrong for several reasons.

1. The answer is right that network latency and data transfer is a severe factor but it neglects that scraping the web is done multi threaded.
   You can ignore the time it takes to wait for responses and have data transfered if you have a good multi-threading core which just spawns additional workers internally to operate at maximum efficiency.
2. The recommended Python is extremely slow in comparison to a C++ project (which should be the right choice for professional largest scale scraping) we don’t talk about a few times, we talk about 400–500 times slower.
3. Another point is memory consumption, high level languages just like python, perl, php use memory as if it was popcorn in a cinema.
   We talk about 4 to 20 times the memory consumption in comparison with C/C++
   Might not sound like much ? Consider you have 10000 threads scraping, each of them operating at 10 mbps (totallying the 10gbps throughput you’ll probably have on the server) you’ll have a gigabyte of data per second to work with. That data needs to be passed along, encoded, decoded, DOM parsed, stored .. So even if you’d have the CPU power for the extremely slow high end language you’ll find a memory bottleneck as well.
4. Last part, the suggested ASM (assembly) is not a candidate, assembly optimization would be used in extremely time critical algorithms. For example in cryptography or neural network optimization. Definitely not in web scraping.

In shorter words: The fastest language is of course C/C++
The downside is a lot more work to develop and maintain the scraping job.
It always depends on the project, also a mix of languages is possible.

If you asking about possible usages of the results of web-crawling, then there are plenty:
1. Results can be used for business intelligence purposes in practically all areas
2. For various marketing researches, eg to find our reaction of people to new product your company just released
3. For machine learning purposes to train NN or to use in NLP systems
4. Real estate agencies often uses scraped data for appraisal purposes
5. Data and investigative journalism always using gathered data
6. If you are providing aggregation services, crawled data will be useful for you

and so on. Data is everywhere and everyone uses it.

What Is Web Scraping?

Whether you’re a marketer, salesperson, recruiter, entrepreneur, etc., You need data to run a business or a marketing campaign. If you’re like most marketers, you also want a luxurious life and you don't want to waste time searching for clients' data instead of targeting them directly with data.

And that’s where web scraping comes in.

Web scraping is the practice of using tools to automate activities you would otherwise have to perform manually. These include extracting data from websites, organizing data, saving data in different formats, and many others.

What Are Web Crawling Tools?

Web Crawling tools are software designed to mimic human behavior as they find, extract, and export data from websites, search engines, and local files like a human. Besides saving you time, Web crawling tools also have the benefits of:

• Helping you run targeted and successful marketing campaigns.
• Data helps you to retarget customers.

In short, web data extraction tools make it easier for you to achieve your business and professional goals on the platform.

From my point of view, main benefits of web crawling are:

• our days you can find very much data in the web. Its not literal “everything” but still - the estimates of web index size is near 50 billions of pages - and its just the visible and indexed web!
• most of this data is very easy to access. In the end, someone made it accessible to the world.

And, as it always is, the downsides are just the continuation of benefits:

• questionable legality. Yes, the data is in the public access, what could be illegal? Still, check this very good answer about scraping legality from Pablo Hoffman, one of the founders of Scrapinghub.
• in most cases, you will be scraping the data which was converted from storage format to the human-readable format(we all still remember that web is for humans, right?), and you’re reversing the process. The nature of this process just kills me.
• in some philosophical way, the data scraping itself doesn’t create anything. Its just about moving data between different storages

Web crawling, also known as web scraping, is the process of systematically browsing and collecting data from websites across the internet. It's a fundamental component of many web-based applications and search engines. Web crawling is a data collection process that involves systematically browsing websites to gather information. Here are five key points on how web crawling works:

1. Seed URLs: It begins with a list of initial web addresses (URLs), often referred to as seed URLs, which serve as starting points for the crawler.
2. HTTP Requests: The web crawler sends HTTP requests to these URLs, asking for the web page's content. This content includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other resources.
3. HTML Parsing: Upon receiving the content, the crawler parses the HTML code to extract links to other web pages. These links are typically found in anchor tags (<a>) with href attributes.
4. Link Queue: The crawler maintains a queue of URLs to visit, continuously adding newly discovered links to this queue. This process allows it to explore multiple pages across the web.
5. Data Storage: The collected data, such as text, images, or structured information, is stored in a database for further analysis or use. Web crawling serves various purposes, including search engine indexing, content extraction, and competitive analysis.

Web crawling is the process of systematically browsing the web to index content for search engines. Web crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, are computer programs that follow links on web pages to find new pages to index. They typically start at a list of known pages, such as the home pages of popular websites, and then follow the links on those pages to find new pages.

Web crawlers are an essential part of search engines, as they allow them to index the vast amount of content on the web. They also play a role in other applications, such as website monitoring and spam detection.

There are a number of different factors that web crawlers consider when deciding whether or not to index a page. These factors include the page's content, its popularity, and its freshness. Web crawlers also follow a number of rules to ensure that they do not overload websites or violate their terms of service.

Web crawling is a complex process, but it is essential for the functioning of the web. By indexing the content of websites, web crawlers make it possible for users to find the information they need quickly and easily.

Here are some of the benefits of web crawling:

• It helps search engines index the web. Web crawlers are the foundation of search engines, as they allow them to index the vast amount of content on the web. This makes it possible for users to find the information they need quickly and easily.
• It helps websites monitor their traffic. Web crawlers can be used to monitor the traffic to a website. This information can be used to identify trends in traffic, track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and identify security vulnerabilities.
• It helps to detect spam. Web crawlers can be used to detect spam websites. This is done by looking for websites that have a high number of links from other spam websites.

Here are some of the challenges of web crawling:

• It can be slow. Web crawlers need to follow links on web pages, which can take time. This can be a problem for websites with a lot of content.
• It can be expensive. Web crawlers need to be hosted on servers, which can be expensive. This can be a problem for small businesses.
• It can be difficult to keep up with the web. The web is constantly changing, which means that web crawlers need to be updated regularly. This can be a challenge for large search engines.

Overall, web crawling is a complex process that has both benefits and challenges. However, it is an essential part of the web and plays a vital role in making the web accessible to users.

Before answering your question, I did a little reassarch using Wikipeda and found

A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an appliction that systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing (web spidering).

Web search engines and some other sites use Web crawling or spidering software to update their web content or indices of others sites' web content. Web crawlers copy pages for processing by a search engine which indexes the downloaded pages so users can search more efficiently.

Crawlers consume resources on visited systems and often visit sites without approval. Issues of schedule, load, and "politeness" come into play when large collections of pages are accessed. Mechanisms exist for public sites not wishing to be crawled to make this known to the crawling agent.

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Answer Have not prevented web crawling on my sites because I encourage search engines to index the site. Most commercial sites are similar and welcome search engines.

I suspect that the super large sites like Amazon that have heavy traffic will limit web crawling for performance reasons.

Web scraping and crawling are complex topics when it comes to their legality and potential liability. As someone who has built a successful skincare brand and online presence, I've had to navigate these issues myself. Let me share some insights based on my experience and research.

First, it's important to understand that web scraping and crawling are not inherently illegal. Many websites and businesses rely on these techniques to gather data, monitor competitors, and improve their services. However, the legality can depend on factors like the website's terms of service, the amount and type of data scraped, and how the scraped data is used.

In some cases, web scraping can potentially violate laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) or copyright law if done improperly. For example, if a website's terms of service prohibit scraping or accessing the site in an automated way, doing so could be considered a breach of contract or even "unauthorized access" under the CFAA.

Additionally, scraping large amounts of copyrighted content like articles or images could infringe on the copyrights of the site owners. Even if the data itself isn't copyrighted, the way it's organized and structured on the site might be considered a "compilation copyright."

That said, many court cases have established that scraping public data is generally legal, especially if the data is used in a transformative way to create something new. For instance, a search engine like Google relies on crawling and indexing websites to make information more accessible to users. This has been upheld as fair use rather than copyright infringement.

The key seems to be acting in good faith, respecting robot.txt files that specify crawling permissions, avoiding aggressive scraping that overloads servers, and using the data responsibly in a way that benefits users. Building a successful skincare brand has taught me the importance of putting customers first in everything I do.

Of course, this is a complex legal area that's still evolving. I recently came across a helpful article on this very topic at PhantomBuster. It does a great job breaking down some of the nuances and considerations around web scraping and crawling. I'd definitely recommend giving it a read if you want to learn more.

At the end of the day, my approach has been to focus on creating great content and products that really serve my audience, while being mindful of respecting other site owners and staying within legal boundaries. It's a fine line to walk sometimes, but operating with integrity has always served me well in the long run. I believe if your intentions are good and you do your due diligence, web scraping can be a perfectly legitimate and valuable tool for growing your business.

Web crawling, the process of systematically browsing and collecting data from websites, offers several advantages:

1. **Data Collection:** Web crawling allows you to gather vast amounts of data from the internet, enabling businesses and researchers to access information for various purposes.

2. **Content Indexing:** Search engines use web crawling to index web pages, making it easier for users to find relevant information through search queries.

3. **Market Research:** Businesses can use web crawling to gather competitive intelligence, track pricing data, and monitor market trends, helping in strategic decision-making.

4. **SEO Analysis:** Webmasters and SEO professionals use crawlers to analyze website performance, identify issues, and improve search engine rankings.

5. **Content Aggregation:** News aggregators and content websites use web crawling to collect articles and updates from various sources, providing users with a curated content feed.

6. **Price Comparison:** E-commerce websites can crawl competitors' websites to compare product prices, helping them adjust their own pricing strategies.

7. **Monitoring and Alerts:** Web crawling can be used to monitor websites for changes, sending alerts when specific content or data is updated.

8. **Data Enrichment:** Crawlers can extract data from websites and enrich it with additional information, making it more valuable for analysis.

9. **Competitor Analysis:** Companies can track their competitors' online activities, product launches, and marketing strategies through web crawling.

10. **Academic Research:** Researchers use web crawling to collect data for academic studies, social network analysis, and sentiment analysis.

11. **Government and Law Enforcement:** Government agencies and law enforcement use web crawlers for investigations, surveillance, and data collection for legal purposes.

12. **Content Archiving:** Organizations can use web crawling to create archives of web content, preserving historical data and records.

13. **Marketplace Listings:** E-commerce platforms and marketplaces crawl for product listings, ensuring up-to-date inventory and pricing information.

14. **Language Processing:** Web crawling is often used to collect text data for natural language processing tasks, such as sentiment analysis and chatbot training.

15. **Real-time Data:** Some web crawlers can provide real-time data, allowing businesses to make immediate decisions based on current online information.

Despite these advantages, it's essential to note that web crawling should be done responsibly and ethically, respecting website terms of service, robots.txt rules, and privacy regulations to avoid legal and ethical issues.

Web scraping and web crawling are both essential processes for gathering information from websites, and though they are often used interchangeably, they serve distinct purposes. These techniques play key roles in various digital services, including search engines, data aggregation platforms, and market research, among others.

What is Web Crawling?

Web crawling is the automated process of navigating the internet to collect and catalog data from websites. This task is performed by web crawlers—also known as spiders or bots—which are programmed scripts that systematically visit web pages, follow internal links, and move from one page to the next in a continuous cycle.

The primary goal of web crawling is to index website content, making it easy to search and retrieve. A prime example of this is how search engines, like Google, use crawlers to scan and index vast numbers of web pages. This allows users to quickly find relevant information when performing searches.

Crawlers typically adhere to guidelines set in a site’s robots.txt file, which can specify sections of a site that should be off-limits for crawling. In addition to indexing, crawlers collect metadata, follow links, and organize data in a way that can be efficiently searched and retrieved.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping, on the other hand, is the process of extracting specific data from a website. While web crawling involves scanning entire web pages, scraping is more focused—extracting particular pieces of information, such as product listings, contact details, news articles, or even social media posts.

Scraping tools or scripts access the raw HTML code of a page, pull out the required data, and store it in a structured format—such as a CSV file, a database, or a JSON file. Unlike crawling, which captures general site content, web scraping is custom-designed to extract specific data based on the user's needs.

For example, an online retailer might use scraping to collect pricing, descriptions, and availability information from various competitors to create a detailed comparison. Similarly, journalists might scrape news websites for relevant articles or quotes about a particular subject.

Key Differences Between Crawling and Scraping

1. Scope: Web crawling involves browsing and indexing entire websites, while web scraping is focused on extracting specific data from individual pages.
2. Purpose: Crawling is mainly used for search engine indexing, ensuring websites are cataloged and searchable. Scraping, however, is used for targeted data extraction for purposes such as research, analysis, or comparison.
3. Tools: Web crawlers are typically designed to handle the indexing of large volumes of content across many websites. In contrast, web scraping tools are more specialized and often require custom coding or templates to extract precise data.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

Both web scraping and crawling raise important legal and ethical issues. Overzealous scraping or crawling can burden website servers, and in some cases, it may be viewed as unauthorized data collection. Many websites implement measures such as CAPTCHA, rate-limiting, or IP blocking to prevent excessive scraping. Additionally, some sites include clauses in their terms of service that prohibit scraping altogether.

It’s essential to understand the rules and guidelines of any site you're interacting with, ensuring that your web scraping and crawling activities comply with legal standards and respect user privacy.

Conclusion

To sum up, web crawling is about scanning and indexing entire websites for later access (often for search engine purposes), while web scraping focuses on extracting specific data from a page for analysis or comparison. While both processes are indispensable in the digital age, they have different functions—crawling for indexing and searching, and scraping for gathering targeted data. Being aware of these differences and using these techniques responsibly is crucial in today’s data-driven world.

This can be of great advantage especially for those dealing with tough competition in their industry. Sun Tzu, the Chinese general cum military strategist, opined that “If you know your enemies and yourself, you’ll never be defeated” To thrive in your industry, you need to survey your competitors. You need to get wind of what’s working for them. Their pricing, marketing strategies, and all.

With Web Crawlers, you can extract data automatically from various competitors’ websites without any hassle. This provides you and your employees the opportunity to save time for other productive tasks. The fact that the data are automatically extracted gives you the benefit of having access to data of great volume.

If you have a sales team, product management team, or even the marketing team required to survey new products/services of competitors. Then you should consider Web Crawlers. It also gives the chance to review your pricing and ensure that they are competitive. With the extracted data you’ve acquired from various websites. You get to figure out the marketing strategies of your competitors.

Keeping Track With the Industry Trends

Staying informative with the trends in your industry is essential in building values and credibility. It also proves to the public that your company is promising. Business moguls understand the importance of catching up with the latest developments in their industry. Irrespective of the current state of your business, make time to stay informed. With access to a large volume of data from various sites. Web Crawlers provide you the opportunity to keep track of your industry trends.

I don’t know what information you’ve been consuming or where you’ve been getting your information from, but I find it hard to believe web crawling is expensive, unless your question didn’t capture well what you really meant.

Saying these because there are a ton of free web scrapers not to talk of the inexpensive and well affordable web crawlers out there you could employ to do your basic web crawling activities. If you;re s concerned with the supposed ‘expensive’ nature of web crawlers you might want to build your own.

Below are a list of web scrapers that are free or almost free:

• Proxy Crawl.
• Parsehub
• Mozenda
• Dex. io
• Import. io

One thing you should know is that a free web crawler would find it hard to outperform a paid one due to obvious reasons, but nevertheless the above is best list of free and almost free web crawlers out there.

please check Whether you're an advertiser, salesman, spotter, business visionary, and so forth, You really want information to maintain a business or a promoting effort. In the event that you're similar to most advertisers, you likewise need a rich life and you would rather not sit around looking for clients' information as opposed to focusing on them straightforwardly with information.

Also, that is where web scratching comes in.

Web scratching is the act of utilizing apparatuses to computerize exercises you would somehow need to physically perform. These incorporate removing information from sites, putting together information, saving information in various configurations, and numerous others.

What Are Web Crawling Tools?

Web Crawling apparatuses

are programming intended to copy human way of behaving as they find, concentrate, and commodity information from sites, web search tools, and neighborhood documents like a human. Other than saving you time, Web creeping apparatuses additionally have the advantages of:

Assisting you with running designated and fruitful showcasing efforts.

Information helps you to retarget clients.

To put it plainly, web information extraction apparatuses make it simpler for you to accomplish your business and expert objectives on the stage.website Divinfosys.com

A web crawler is a program that browses the web and collects information. It is also known as a crawling agent, a spider bot, web crawling software, website spider, and a search engine bot. To put it another way, the spider bot navigates its way through different websites and search engines in an effort to gather information.

Crawlers for the web begin their work with a list of known URLs and crawl the contents of these sites first. Web crawlers then go on to the next stage, which is to follow any hyperlinks that lead to other URLs and crawl those sites. As a direct consequence of this, the process may never finish. Because of this, web crawlers are programmed to adhere to certain regulations. For instance, which sites should be crawled, how often they should crawl those pages to check for updated material, and a great deal more information.

There are many different kinds of web crawling software available, like Octoparse, for instance. These web crawling software are developed in such a manner that you didn’t need any kind of coding in order to extract data from a website. For lead creation and other purposes, scraping e-commerce websites, tweets, and Facebook group postings etc.

I would be very interested in answering your question as we are thinking similarly. I also want to implement projects that help me learn machine learning applying algorithms but on data that i can gather from other websites.

As a step one, you can try different machine learning algorithms on a public dataset to begin with. Try to visit www.kaggle.com. They have data sets and want people to apply algorithms. Other data sets like NY taxi are also available for you to play with.

Once you are good with applying algorithms on datasets, you can harvest your own data from websites using a crawler and apply intelligent ways to find patterns and trends to begin with.

Other projects that i can think of are

1. Analyze hacker news and find out what is the trend of the overall site with respect to articles voted.
2. Repeatedly, Crawl a product site like macy’s and see the trends of different products and their costs, to see if they go down or up.
3. Crawl a song lyrics site to see if there are songs related to some keywords or similar theme.
4. Analyze slashdot articles and comments and try sentiment analysis.
5. Crawl yelp database and see if you can reverse engineer their ranking using machine learning.