What is Web Scraping?
Web Scraping is the practice of scraping text or data from websites, typically using software.
Why scrape the web?
There are many reasons to scrape the web:
- Data analysis: Web scraping is often used used to collect data for analysis, e.g., sentiment analysis, market research, and consumer behavior analysis.
- Content aggregation: Web scraping is also used to collect articles from different news sources for aggregation and analysis.
- Machine learning: Web scraping can be used to train machine learning models by collecting large datasets from the web.
- Search engine optimization: SEO specialists use web scraping to gather data for keyword research and to optimize their websites for search engines.
How to scrape the web?
To scrape the web, create a program that goes through the following steps: download the webpage(s) to be scraped, extract the relevant data from each page, and store the extracted data in a structured data store, usually a database or spreadsheet. In theory, the first step is as easy as just sending a web request, but in practice, scraping the web at scale involves complex topics like IP address rotation, proxy management, and so on. The second step is typically challenging and expensive because every website is different, and extracting data from multiple sites requires custom code for each site, which can quickly become unmanageable and unsustainable as the number of sites to scrape grows. These complexities make the maintenance of web scrapers difficult and expensive.
Fortunately, there's arachn.io. The arachn.io API has several endpoints, but the extract endpoint is a URL extractor that extracts content from webpages uses sophisticated algorithms and artificial intelligence. With arachn.io, there is no need to write custom code for every site to scrape, and unlike other web scraping tools, there is no need to train arachn.io. The arachn.io API will extract content from any website out of the box.
Using arachn.io, it's trivial to build a web scraper to do the following for any site:
- Extract URL titles
- Extract content from articles
- Link extractor
What does arachn.io scrape?
The arachn.io engine is capable of distinguishing between various types of webpages, and responds accordingly with unique data. For instance, if a news article were scraped, then arachn.io might provide details like the publication date, author, article content, links embedded in the article content, and other related facts.
The full list of data the arachn.io API can scrape from pages is available in the developer documentation.
What is a web crawler?
A web scraper is a program that extracts content from a given list of URLs. A web crawler, also known as a web spider, is a program that scrapes data from a small list of seed URLs, and then adds the links it finds in those webpages to the list of pages to crawl. In this way, the web crawler is like a spider whose web is the entire WWW! Web crawlers will be discussed in more detail in a later post.
