However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages ( HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. An example would be finding and copying names and telephone numbers, companies and their URLs, or e-mail addresses to a list (contact scraping).Īs well as contact scraping, web scraping is used as a component of applications used for web indexing, web mining and data mining, online price change monitoring and price comparison, product review scraping (to watch the competition), gathering real estate listings, weather data monitoring, website change detection, research, tracking online presence and reputation, web mashup, and web data integration. Web scrapers typically take something out of a page, to make use of it for another purpose somewhere else. The content of a page may be parsed, searched and reformatted, and its data copied into a spreadsheet or loaded into a database. Therefore, web crawling is a main component of web scraping, to fetch pages for later processing.

Fetching is the downloading of a page (which a browser does when a user views a page).

Scraping a web page involves fetching it and extracting from it. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites.

For broader coverage of this topic, see Data scraping.

Lead scraper software