A lot goes into making a business retain its profitability or getting it to grow. In the digitized world of the present, a big chunk of any business is dependent on the internet. The internet is a huge hub of an incomprehensible amount of data and businesses today can make use of a selective part of this mass and benefit from them. Web scraping or web data extraction is one of the many ways in which a person or a company can get access to relevant data available on the internet.
What is web data extraction?
Web data extraction or web scraping or web harvesting is, as the names suggest, a method of extracting data from different websites. Data scraping is done through web scraping softwares which have a direct access to the World Wide Web either through the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or through a browser.
It is possible to do web scraping manually by a software user but doing it through an automated process is the usual case. In the latter, the automated procedure is implemented through using a bot or a web crawler. In this process, specific data is collected and copied from the internet into a local database or spreadsheet to be used for analytical or retrieval purposes.