What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is an automated process of extracting data from the web. This could be anything from small scripts collecting the current weather data to massive programs collecting all e-commerce product information.

Web scrapers can be programmed in almost any programming language and only require minimum processing resources and an internet connection.

Why Scrape Web Data?

It takes little imagination what could be done with web scraped data though here are some common use cases:

• Business Analytics - scraping product data and competitors' performance.
• Lead Generation - scraping public details of businesses or persons to find employees or potential partners.
• AI training - the web is full of creative content that can be used to develop artificial intelligence.
• Market Analysis - using web scraping we can understand how the web works, what are popular web scraping technologies etc.