What is Data | Web Scraping? An Essential Guide for Beginners

Web scraping is a fundamental technique in the data-driven world, involving extracting data (simply any information) from websites. This guide aims to introduce the concepts of data scraping to people who are new to this practice. 

At its core, web scraping can be done with the help of people too. Any information we copy from the web and paste to another place is called web or data scraping. Instead of you, doing this job, software called bots or web crawlers are used to retrieve information from websites while converting this information into a structured format for analysis. 

With the increasing relevance of data in decision-making, understanding web scraping is essential for anyone from marketers to data scientists.

Web scraping vs Data scraping

While often used interchangeably, web scraping and data scraping have different meanings. Web scraping specifically refers to the extraction of data from websites. It's a subset of data scraping, which deals with a broader range of sources, including databases and APIs. Web scraping focuses on HTML and XML extraction, while data scraping might involve working with various data formats and structures. 

Both practices, however, share a common goal: to retrieve and transform data into a more usable format. Understanding these differences is key to choosing the right approach for your data needs.

Why do we need data scraping? What problems scraping is solving? 

Data scraping automates the labor-requiring data collection process, saving time and resources. This automation enables businesses and researchers to access and analyze large datasets that would be impractical to gather manually. 

Data scraping also plays a vital role in 

• Competitive analysis
• Market research
• Lead generation
• Data based decision-making
• Trend analysis

Which platforms we can scrape?

The potential platforms for web scraping are diverse and include nearly all online domains. Common targets include 

• Social media channels
• E-commerce websites
• Real estate listings
• Job boards
• Search engines
• News sources
• Government sources

Each platform offers unique data sets valuable for different purposes – consumer behavior on social media, pricing strategies on e-commerce sites, market trends in real estate, and employment shifts on job portals. The versatility of web scraping tools means that any website with publicly accessible data can be a source, provided it adheres to legal and ethical scraping guidelines.

What can we scrape from the web?

The range of data you can scrape from the web is extensive. This includes text content, images, videos, metadata, and HTML code. Specific examples are 

• Product listings
• Customer reviews
• Social media posts
• Profiles
• Comments
• Photos
• Keywords and hashtags 
• Contact information
• Financial data
• Research data
• Industry statistics and insights

The key is that the data must be visible and accessible to a browser or bot. Web scraping can extract, reformat, and integrate data into databases or analytical tools, turning this vast web-based information into actionable insights.