The Difference Between Web Scraping and Web Crawling – A Complete Breakdown

Web scraping and web crawling: Both terms go hand in hand with some slight differences. The majority of people are confused by these two terms as they seem identical since both have similarities to some extent. This article will bring you a clear picture of what these two terms are.

What is Web Scraping?

In simple terms, web scraping is the extraction of web data from websites or web pages. The extracted data is then saved into a specific file format. Web scraping can be done manually; however, web scrapers are used to automate this process.

As a critical aspect that can be pointed out, web scraping tools extract only specific data in a focused approach on target websites. The extracted web data is then stored for further analysis.

What is Web Crawling?

Web crawling or data crawling deals with large data sets and is not limited to small workloads. According to layman’s terms, web crawling (and indexing) is what search engines perform. Basically, it’s what you see on search results pages. The web crawler (also known as spiders or bots) crawls through the web to look for specific information by clicking on every available link.

Web Scraping vs. Web Crawling

Let’s break it down this way to get a general understanding of what scraping and crawling are.

Web crawling systematically browses and clicks on different targets of the web or any other source to detect changes and notify them, whereas web scraping is downloading the crawled content into your computer/database in a specific format.

Data scrapers know what to scrape, so they look for specific data to fetch. Most commonly, scrapers are looking for market data such as prices, data, descriptions, and titles. The data can be used for future analysis and making business decisions that could help grow your business.

Significant differences in web scraping and web crawling will be discussed under separate sections from here on.

Web Scraping process

The web scraping process can be explained in three steps as follows;

1. Request-Response

• First, you are required to request the target website to obtain the content of the specific URL.
• In response, the scraper obtains the data in HTML format.

2. Parse and Extract

Parsing applies to any computer language. This process involves taking the code as a text format and producing a structure that the computer can understand and work with.

3. Download Data

As the final part, the downloaded data will be saved in a JSON, CSV, or a database and used for later analysis.

Web Crawling Process

1. Select a starting seed URL.
2. Add it to the frontier
3. Select the URL from the frontier
4. Get the web page corresponding to the particular URL
5. Parse the web page to get new URLs
6. All the newly found URLs being added to the frontier
7. Repeat step 3 until the frontier is empty

Movement

• Web scraping – Only scrapes the data (gets only the specific data and downloads it).
• Web crawling – Only crawls the data (goes through specifically selected targets).

Deduplication

• Web scraping – not an essential factor as it can be performed manually, hence done in smaller scales.
• Web crawling – the crawler filters out duplicated data.

Labor 

• Web scraping – can be performed manually.
• Web crawling – can be achieved only using a crawling agent (bot or spider).

Check out more web scraping related articles in our blog.

Residential Proxies for Scraping and Crawling

By now, you must be having a clear understanding of what web crawling and web scraping are all about. When talking about getting successful and accurate results, using a residential proxy network is the most recommended way to overcome web scraping and crawling challenges.

Some of the challenges you would encounter while using low-quality proxies

• The high frequency of web data extraction leads your IPs to be blacklisted.
• A slow or unstable loading speed.
• The quality of data, which affects the integrity of the overall data.

A Better Solution for Scraping and Crawling

Using a residential proxy network with 24/7 active residential IPs allows
you to scrape and crawl websites faster and with higher accuracy. 

Combined with a dynamic P2P network for additional scalability boost, access any web page using a highly-anonymous and stable residential proxy network.