In order to understand what is web scraping, in today’s competitive world, everyone is looking for ways to innovate and make use of new technologies. Web Scraping (also called web data extraction) is an automated process with enormous added value for every business.

Web Scraping: Definition

It is an automatic method of getting large amounts of public data from websites and exporting it in a structured format. It can be used for various purposes. Use cases of web scraping include price monitoring and price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, competitive intelligence, and market research, among many others.

In general:

Web data extraction is used by individuals and companies who want to use publicly available web data to make smarter decisions. It is relevant to consider that Web Scraping is useful if the public website you want to get data from does not have an API or only provides limited access to web data. And most of this data is unstructured data in HTML format that is then converted to structured data in a spreadsheet or database so that it can get it in various applications.

In case you are wondering if Web Scraping an ethical and legal way of working

Of course, it is, and in previous posts, we explained the ethics and legality of its methodology, which considerably protects business data with effective compliance.

Web Scraping solutions adapted to business needs and described in different steps of our work process:

1) Understanding the client’s needs

2) Preparing the scrapers

3) Extracting the data

4) Processing the data

5) Delivering the data

6) Ongoing support and maintenance

On this road to explain all steps of the web scraping process,  we will start by explaining Step 1 in detail, so you can comprehend how important it is for us to  understand our client’s needs. Also, in future posts, we will continue to explain each step of this Web Scraping Methodology.