Web scraping is a term that’s usually associated with bots, who scour and scrape webpages when attempting to fetch data from those pages. When bots go about scraping, they’re seeking to parse and extract relevant data which they can then save onto a database. That database will help them understand the content on a webpage or give them access to data they can later analyse for indexing purposes.
When to Use Web Scraping
The same process can be used by businesses for multiple purposes. For instance, web scraping is often used in order to rapidly scrape email addresses from a URL, which can help individuals engaged in email marketing to certain businesses. Here are some other benefits:
- Scraping can be set up to gather company data on your competitors that is hosted on their website
- Scraping is the key technology behind price aggregation and comparison websites, which are visited by millions of web users each day
- Scraping can help websites automate RSS feeds if they’re interested in sharing relevant news with their audiences
- Scraping can deliver enriched marketing research data if targeted at competitors and customers
