Web scraping is an automated technique used to extract large amounts of data from websites. This data is typically unstructured and in HTML format, which is then converted into structured data in a spreadsheet or database for various applications¹. Web scraping is particularly useful when you need to gather vast amounts of information quickly, such as for training machine learning algorithms or conducting market research¹.

How Web Scraping Works

Web scraping involves two main components: the crawler and the scraper. The crawler is an artificial intelligence algorithm that browses the web to find the required data by following links across the internet. The scraper, on the other hand, is a tool designed to extract data from the website¹. The process typically involves specifying the URLs to scrape, loading the HTML code, and extracting the required data, which is then saved in a structured format like CSV or JSON².

Types of Web Scrapers