What is Web Scraping?

Introduction

Web Scraping is the process of using bots to extract content and data from a web page, let's try to answer the question What is Web Scraping?

The web scraping technique copies the extracts underlying the HTML code. And, with it, the data stored in a database. Web scraping can copy or replicate the entire content of the website elsewhere.

Web scraping is used in a variety of digital businesses that rely on data collection. A priori it does not have to be a bad thing or something to try to avoid. It can help us to expand our online business. There are a variety of examples:

Search engine bots that crawl a website, analysing its content and then ranking it. For example, the Google bot. We want it to crawl our website so that it can index it, especially if we have optimised it for SEO.

The famous price comparators, which implement bots to automatically obtain prices and product descriptions for affiliated sellers' websites. For example, typical price comparison portals for hotels, insurance, etc.

Market research companies. Use bots to extract data from forums and social media (e.g. for social analysis or usage habits).

However, web scraping is also used for illegal purposes, such as stealing copyrighted content or spying on competitors.

Web scraping tools

Web scraping tools are software (i.e. bots) programmed to filter databases and extract information. A variety of different types of bots are used, where many of them are fully customisable to: Recognise HTML site structures The data collected is used to extract, extract and transform the content of a website, store the collected data, and extract data from APIs.

Since all scraping bots have the same purpose - to access website data - it can be difficult to distinguish between legitimate and malicious bots. But there are some key differences that help distinguish between the two types:

Legitimate web scraping

Legitimate bots identify themselves with the entity they are scraping for. For example, Googlebot identifies itself in its HTTP header as belonging to Google.

Legitimate bots respect a site's robot.txt file. This lists those pages that a bot is allowed to access and those that it is not.

The resources required to run scraping bots are substantial. So much so that legitimate web scraping entities invest heavily in servers to process the large amount of data they extract.

Malicious web scraping

Web scraping is considered malicious when data is extracted without the website owners' permission. Malicious bots spoof legitimate traffic by creating a fake HTTP user agent. In addition, they crawl the website regardless of what the website administrator has allowed.

The two most common use cases for malicious web scraping are the price scraping and the content theft.

In the price scrapingusually a botnet is used. From this network, crawler bots are launched to inspect the databases of competing businesses. The aim is to access, above all, price information.

Attacks frequently occur in companies where products are easily comparable and price plays an important role in the purchasing decisions of consumer users.

Victims of price scraping can be travel agencies, ticket sellers and online e-tailers. That is, to gain an advantage over their competitors. A supplier can use a bot to continuously extract its competitors' websites and instantly update its own prices.

The content scraping involves large-scale content theft from a given website. Typical targets are online product catalogues and websites that rely on digital content to drive their business. For example, local online business directories invest significant amounts of time, money and energy to build their content database. Scraping can result in all content being harvested, and used in spam campaigns or resold to competitors.

Increase your sales with web scraping

Having seen the two types of scraping (legitimate and malicious), let's focus again on the legitimate ones. Let's take an example, suppose you have an online shop and you want to connect to Google Merchant Center or solostock.com. With this technique you will be able to publish your products on those websites by simply taking over your original one.

The others will automatically be updated as you update yours. And you won't need to spend more time and effort on the others.

Therefore, from Aulatina, we can work legitimate web scraping on your website so that you can increase your sales and visibility on the Internet.