Originally published as https://reurl.cc/Do1ygN
The market size of big data and business analytics reached $198.08 billion in 2020 which is estimated to be a $684.12 billion industry by 2030. Unsurprisingly, the leaders of tomorrow are collecting data today. Whether you are exploring possibilities or just starting to kick into the big data industry, web scraping is a must-have technique for you.
Web scraping is the go-to approach to mining the web and extracting valuable data. With web scraping, you can not be bored by questions like how you can get the wanted data, instead paying more attention to solving problems like what data your business can leverage and how to utilize that data. This article will give you a no-brainer introduction to web scraping techniques, tools, and tips to scrape websites. Hope these ideas can help you make smarter decisions for your business.
What is Web Scraping
In layman’s language,
- It is a process of collecting information from different websites on the web;
- This is an automated process;
- The same applies to data extraction, content scraping, data scraping, web crawling, data mining, content mining, information collection, and data collection.
Manual scraping vs. Web scraping
Imagine that you are going to capture the email addresses of people who have commented on a LinkedIn post. The first mindset that jumps into your brain may be pointing the cursor to the string of an email address, and then copying and pasting it onto a file. You are literally doing manual scraping when you repeat the same process over and over again.
However, web scraping is a term for having the same process done at scale using some sort of program or bot. It can take hours for anyone to collect 2000-ish emails while it only takes 30 seconds for a web scraping tool to complete the same task. It’s hard not to notice the difference.
In technical lingo, the web is inundated with data, whether structured or not. Website data, including text, images, videos…
