How Web Scrapers Work?
Web Scrapers can extract all the data on particular sites or the specific data that a user wants. Ideally, it’s best if you specify the data you want so that the web scraper only extracts that data quickly. For example, you might want to scrape an Amazon page for the types of juicers available, but you might only want the data about the models of different juicers and not the customer reviews.
So, when a web scraper needs to scrape a site, first the URLs are provided. Then it loads all the HTML code for those sites and a more advanced scraper might even extract all the CSS and Javascript elements as well. Then the scraper obtains the required data from this HTML code and outputs this data in the format specified by the user. Mostly, this is in the form of an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file, but the data can also be saved in other formats, such as a JSON file.
What is Web Scraping and How to Use It?
Suppose you want some information from a website. Let’s say a paragraph on Donald Trump! What do you do? Well, you can copy and paste the information from Wikipedia into your file. But what if you want to get large amounts of information from a website as quickly as possible? Such as large amounts of data from a website to train a Machine Learning algorithm? In such a situation, copying and pasting will not work! And that’s when you’ll need to use Web Scraping. Unlike the long and mind-numbing process of manually getting data, Web scraping uses intelligence automation methods to get thousands or even millions of data sets in a smaller amount of time.
Table of Content
- What is Web Scraping?
- How Web Scrapers Work?
- Types of Web Scrapers
- Why is Python a popular programming language for Web Scraping?
- What is Web Scraping used for?
If you are coming to a sticky end while trying to collect public data from websites, we have a solution for you. Smartproxy is a tool that offers a solution to deal with all the hurdles with a single tool. Their formula for scraping any website is: 40M+ pool of residential and data center proxies + powerful web scraper = Web Scraping API. This tool ensures that you get the needed data in raw HTML at a 100% success rate.
With Web Scraping API, you can collect real-time data from any city worldwide. You can rely on this tool even when scraping websites built with JavaScript and won’t face any hurdles. Additionally, Smartproxy offers four other scrapers to fit all your needs – enjoy eCommerce, SERP, Social Media Scraping APIs and a No-Code scraper that makes data gathering possible even for no-coders. Bring your data collection process to the next level from $50/month + VAT.
But before using Smartproxy or any other tool you must know what web scraping actually is and how it’s done. So let’s understand what Web scraping is in detail and how to use it to obtain data from other websites.