It is common to use the terms web crawling and web scraping interchangeably. They are both employed in data mining? Certainly but they are not the same. We will examine the main difference between web scraping and web crawling in this post and assist you in selecting the one that applies to you and your organization. Let us discuss the difference of Web scraping Vs Web Crawling with the help of the comparison given below.
What is web scraping?
Using the web scraping approach, a lot of data may be extracted from websites and saved locally in the form of XML, Excel or SQL. Web scrapers are the devices used for web scraping. They can quickly extract the data from any website based on the provided specifications. The development of data for machine learning and other purposes is greatly aided by this task automation.
What is web crawling?
Web crawling is similar to spider crawling, except that this time the site of crawling is the web. In essence, it reads web pages on a website in order to create entries for search engine indexes. Web crawlers sometimes referred to as spiders, are the devices used for web crawling. In order to extract information, a succession of websites are studied, and links to the pages on those pages are then tracked to find even additional linkages. Online crawling is done by well-known search engines like google, yahoo, and bing, who utilize this data to index websites.
Key similarities between web crawling and web scraping:
While we have maintained that crawling and scaping are different in many ways, they will share some similarities:
- They both access data by making HTTP requests.
- They are both automated processes. As a result, they offer more precision when retrieving data.
- Web crawlers and scrapers are subject to outright blockades either through IP clampdown or other means.
- They can both serve malicious purposes when used against a source's data protection terms.
- Dedicated tools are available all over the web to either scrape or crawl a website.
- They both download data from the web, despite possible differences in procedure.
Web Scraping Vs Web Crawling:
- We scraping tool used is a web scraper. While web crawling tools used web crawlers or spiders.
- Web scraping is used for downloading information. Crawling the web is used to index online pages.
- Web scraping doesn't obey robots.txt in most cases. While not all web crawlers obey robots.txt.
- Web scraping need not visit all types of websites for information. Web crawling visits each and every page, until the last line for information.
- Web scraping is done on both small and large scales. While web crawling is mostly employed on a large scale.
- Application areas of Web scraping include retail marketing, equity search and machine learning. While web crawling is used in search engines to give search results to the user.
- Web scraping needs a crawl agent and a parser for parsing the response. Web Crawling only needs only crawl agent.
- Web scraping does not always include data de-duplication. While web crawling data de-duplication is an internal part of web scraping.
- Prowebscraper and web scraper.io are examples of Web scraping. Google, yahoo, or bing do web crawling.