With terminology like "web crawling" and "web scraping" being used interchangeably. However, these two approaches actually differ from one another and have different objectives.
👉 Web crawling is the process of traversing around a website, taking note of its structure, content, and connections to other websites on the internet, to index and categorize the data on it. Search engines like Google perform this task, but you can also construct your own web crawler or use specialized tools. Web crawling is primarily used by search engines to compile data about the architecture and content of websites in order to build searchable web indexes.
👉 The process of retrieving particular data from a website is called web scraping, on the other hand. This might be anything from the costs on an e-commerce website to the phone numbers in an online directory. Data extraction using web scraping is more targeted and focused.
The main difference between web crawling and web scraping is that web crawling is less picky and goes through a website to look for any information it can find, while web scraping is more focused and only extracts specific data. Web crawling is frequently necessary for web scraping in order to travel through a website's URLs, however the two operations are closely related.
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Top comments (1)
Very nice! Such a clear explanation of web crawling and web scraping! Web crawling is like a curious explorer, wandering around websites to gather information, while web scraping is more like a focused detective, extracting specific data from those websites. And if you're interested in diving into web scraping, Crawlbase has some awesome tools to help you out.