Web crawling and web scraping are old techniques that have been used for a long time. However, they’ve only recently entered the “mainstream” and became widely available to “ordinary” internet users and small businesses.
Even though they are available and used often, many people still don’t know that these two practices are actually different. For most people, they are interchangeable terms for the same thing. However, there are some crucial differences between them you need to know.
If you understand them better, you’ll find it easier to pick the right option for your needs and achieve better results based on your goals. Today we will address all the misconceptions.
Table of Contents
Defining web scraping
Web scraping or web data extracting is an automated process of going through web pages, locating targeted data, identifying it, and extracting it. Web scraping is done with tools that can go through many pages quickly and extract data based on pre-set parameters.
The exact HTML element structure or another data set identifier is known and used to extract data during the process. It’s a process of extracting publicly available data from the web and storing it on the local computer in a structured way.
Individuals and organizations later use this data for various purposes. Web scraping is commonly used for acquiring data to be analyzed and used for verification, price comparison, competitive research, SEO, etc.
Defining web crawling
Web data crawling or web indexing is the process of indexing page information using automated solutions called “crawlers.” One of the most known crawling processes is what Google’s search engine does. Google constantly sends its crawlers to index pages to rank them in online searches and analyze their content.
Crawlers go through whole pages and check every piece of content and link, looking for all the information that page contains. Crawlers are most commonly used by large search engines, big online aggregators, and statistical agencies.
Web crawling is designed to show all of the information on a page. However, none of the data is extracted or saved in any online or local depository.
Web crawling vs web scraping – main differences
Now let’s see what the main differences between these two techniques are.
Different output
Web scraping can have many different outputs depending on the goal and use. Some of the most common outputs (information) extracted using scraping include:
- Customer reviews
- Images
- Product ratings
- Pricing information
- Search engine results
- Search engine queries
- Social engagement information
- URLs
On the other hand, web crawling usually offers an output of URLs. There are some less common situations when crawling provides different outputs.
Different purpose
Web scraping is all about acquiring publicly available data. Professionals who extract data know the sites where they want to extract it and what those sites contain. They input URLs or domains in their tools to start the scraping process.
On the other hand, URLs and addresses are often unknown with crawling, meaning that this process is used to find relevant domains and URLs and see what information they contain.
Different information
Web scrapers can gather all kinds of data and extract it to local storage in a structured manner. That’s why web scraping has a much broader range of uses. Crawling is focused only on extracting addresses and pages that might contain what the user is looking for and indexing those pages.
To learn more about the web crawling vs web scraping differences, read this new article.
Where are they used?
Because of different output, purpose, and information, these two practices have very different uses. You can’t use them both for the same things. Here are their primary use cases.
Web scraping
Scraping is used when you already know the addresses you are interested in and the data you want. That’s why web scraping is used for lead generation, competition monitoring, price scraping, website testing, SEO research, etc.
How can you know when you need web scraping? The answer is simple. Scraping is the right option for you whenever you need specific data from a website and want to use it for analysis. Instead of going through hundreds of pages or social media profiles manually to get valuable information, you can use a scraper to do this faster in an automated fashion.
Web crawling
The most common use of web scraping is for indexing and ranking web pages. When someone searches for something online, the search engines give specific results in the desired order. That is possible because search engines crawl through pages to learn about the information they offer and see how much value they provide to internet users.
Web crawlers discover addresses and rank them accordingly. At the same time, the second use of crawling is finding pages that contain specific information used for the scraping process.
Conclusion
We hope this post helps you understand the difference between web crawling vs web scraping. Always look at the main functions and outputs before choosing one or the other for your needs.
