Crawling vs scraping – An Ultimate Guide
Crawling vs scraping is a common search because people are always confused about the difference between them. In the first place, some people think that crawling and scraping are the two different names of one thing. But crawling and scraping are two entirely different things. Even though both are used to gather information, the main difference between the terms is that scraping is also done for data that is available publicly even if it is present on your computer or the internet. After scraping the required data, you can download or save it in your computer memory.
You can also do scraping without having access to the internet. If you are concerned with the websites. Then the method used to scrap data online is called web scraping. For this, you must need to have access to the internet. Web scraping can also be done manually but for the sake of web crawling, you must need to have a web crawler. Crawling is an idea of going through all the data, but scraping is to download the data and keep it on your computer.
Keep on reading to get all the information about scraping VS crawling.
What is scraping?
The process of extracting or fetching data from any type of website is known as web scraping. It is performed by automation and for automation, people use bots.. Web scraping is used when we require to fetch targeted data such as emails, addresses, or contact information. You can download the scraped data and save it in your excel sheet for later use. Scraping is not only done for web pages but it can also be used to fetch data from local machines. There are several ways of data scraping. The most commonly used method is scraping with the help of bots. Programmers also use Python to scrape data.
Use of data scraping
Many companies require specific large data to meet their business needs. For that particular purpose they use the scraping technique to gather all useful data & information. It can also be done on a small scale for an individual. For example, if you are looking to generate some leads on your amazon store then you need to scrape all the information on other related products, their prices, sales ratio, reviews, and much more. Here, data scraping can help you to achieve your goals and within a couple of minutes, you can scrape all the necessary information—just a minute or two.
What is Crawling?
As the name indicates crawling refers to the movement just like a spider crawl. This is the reason due to which web crawler is also known as the spider. Crawling is browsing the World wide web and indexing all the information from A to Z. This is usually accomplished by the use of bots that are designed in such a way that they read all the information and crawls accordingly. Web crawlers index all the data present on the web pages including the last dot on the page. Web crawling is done for searching for any type of information. A web crawler is a programmed software that is made for visiting webpages to build entries to use them to index for a search engine.
Use of Crawling
Use of crawling is majorly for large scale projects in which crawlers have to deal with the large-scale data sets. One of the main purposes of crawling is to detect data duplication. Internet is flooded with millions of websites and sometimes people try to duplicate data and use them on their websites as of their own. Here crawlers can help to understand which data is duplicated. Google is also using powerful crawlers to index data.
Famous bots used for scraping and crawling and the role of proxies.
1- Octoparse
When it comes to data scraping and data crawling, Octoparse is one of the most known and powerful robots. You can extract almost any type of data from any type of website with the help of Octoparse. It is specially designed for non-programmers to cope with their difficulty in data extraction. Most people love it because of its user-friendly interface. It has two modes one is Task Template Mode and the other one is Advanced Mode. After gathering desirable information, you can download it as a TXT file, or you can also save it to your database. You do not need to worry about the IP blocking issues because you can use rotating proxies which helps to automate the IPs and there are no chances to be detected by the websites.
2- Cyotek Web Copy
If you are running out of budget and searching for a free web crawler and web scraper than Cyotek WebCopy is a perfect bot for you. It is used to make a copy of partial or complete websites and stores them on your hard disk for offline use. It also offers to change the setting of the bot to crawl it according to your requirements. Because of a free bot, you cannot expect it to handle JavaScript parsing and there are chances of the failure of cytotek Web Copy when it is employed for the task of handling dynamic websites.
3- HTTrack
If you are searching for the most advanced crawler or scraper according to the latest trends, then HTTrack is the perfect one. It supports many useful features that many other bots lack. It is available for all operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Unix, and many others. You can also download a complete website to your computer using this bot within a couple of seconds. One of the most useful features of HTTrack is that it can easily mirror one side of even more than one site according to your need with all shared links.
To access more advanced features, you can also customize it. You can download all the photos, HTML codes, and files of any type from mirrored webpages and it is also capable of resuming interrupted downloads. Dedicated Proxy support is must needed in HTTrack so there is no need to be worried about your security. It works as a command-line program so it can be used by the more experienced programmers and experts.