What are Key things should be know about data scraping

Introduction

Web scraping is meant for web content extraction or web harvesting, which serves an uncountable number of reasons. In detail, web scraping generally refers to gaining data or content available on different websites or blogs or any internet sources. It’s possible through HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or Web browsers. Throughout web scraping methodology, the users or developers get extracted image, text or datamining, and favicon, easily.

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1. Which one is the best web scraping tool?

The best web scraping tool could be selected as per the types of targeted website and its level complexity and restriction. However, the selected tool can assist you to obtain the data quickly and easily with an adequate cost or none, you can opt for any tool you’d prefer. This step is very important to judge the importance of the website.

2. Is web scraping legal always?

Often, Web scraping is not illegal, but it’s considered just as a tool for the purpose of collecting information easily within few moments. However, without permission, if you’re data mining from any govt, tender or any important financial or banking websites, it might go against the law and it’s a kind of stealing non-public information.

3. Why it’s prohibited to scrape data from copyrighted websites?

You can’t copy information from other restricted websites and use them directly in your website. So, you need to write the information in a unique approach and own words to avoid any violation of copyright policy. Just take reference to concepts from other data mining information. Sometimes, hackers use these ‘web scraping’ tactics to steal information like bank id and password. So, be careful from such kind of hackers.

4. Can we scrape social media sites?

Regrettably, some websites like Facebook and LinkedIn are such websites, which block programmed web crawling throughout their robots.txt. But somehow, it’s possible to extract the text from the two websites if you only extract data available to the public.

5. What is a robots.txt file?

Robots.txt is a text file belongs to the web server directory of a website that informs search engine crawlers, spiders or bots, with respect to scrapping restrictions and facilities. Before webs scraping any website, you need to understand the robot.txt file of the same website to cross the restrictions easily.

6. Is the web scraping valuable for digital marketing or online research?

Web scraping is mainly focused on collecting a huge range of information so it can be functional in any type of industry that has requirement of the data for research and analysis purposes. It is often used frequently in market research, human capital optimization, price controlling, lead generation, and many more needs.

7. Extraction from any website is possible?

Practically, this is not feasible to extract content from any website. Since all websites do not follow a universal page format, it would be difficult for one web scraper to connect with all web pages.

8. Is web scraping different from data mining?

Yes of course, Practically Web scraping and data mining are considered as two different perceptions. Web scraping is to gather raw text, images, and other information, but data mining is the procedure of importing or detecting large data sets in a specific pattern.

9. How to scrape data behind a login page?

Scraping data behind a login web page is not tough if you have an active account on the website. The scraping procedure after the login process would be equal to that of a normal web scraping.

10. How to solve CAPTCHA during web scraping?

Generally, CAPTCHA is used to be a terrifying thing for web scraping, but now can be resolved easily. Several web scraping tools have the characteristic of resolving CAPTCHA automatically at the time of the extraction procedure.

11. How web scraping is different from web crawling?

Even though Web scraping and web crawling are two closely relevant concepts, web crawling is used to methodically browsing the WWW, usually for the reason of web indexing.

12. Is it possible to republish the text or image extracted through web crawling?

Sure, but to republish the content you need to have permission from the website owner. Though you can extract text content from websites that permit bots, you still can use this content in a unique approach that does not violate the copyrights of the content publisher.

13. How to extract the content from dynamic website?

Because of frequent edit in a dynamic website, there is no issue at all to extract content from such sites. For instance, often there’re new posts available on Twitter and in order to scrape content from such a website, you can extract data from twitter within a proper interval.

14. How web scraping tools download required files from a website directly?

There are several scraping tools available that can download files from the website directly and save to Dropbox or download folder or other servers at the time of the text information.
Hope, above information could help out to extract image, text or data mining, favicon and other useful information from the websites.