Data or Web Scraping

This term is normally known by the Security department and is tagged with Hackers.

‘Data Scraping is also known as Web Scraping.’

The minor difference between both terms is Data scraping means searching the location of the data and then extracting it. In other words, it does not copy and paste rather extract data in a precise and accurate manner whereas Web scraping involves extracting exactly everything from web pages.

Data Scraping or Web Scraping is the process of importing information from a website into a spreadsheet or local file saved on your computer.

Popular uses of data scraping include:

• Research for web content/business intelligence.
• Pricing for travel booker sites/price comparison sites
• Finding sales leads/conducting market research by crawling public data sources (e.g., Yell and Twitter)
• Sending product data from an e-commerce site to another online vendor (e.g., Google Shopping)

It allows us to take unstructured, scattered data from multiple sources and collect it in one place and make it structured for better use.

Do you know why you get emails from unknown sources?

The dark side of data scraping is its misuse for email harvesting. The scraping of data from websites, social media, and directories to uncover people’s email addresses, which are then sold on to spammers or scammers.