If you are a developer or a website administrator, you must have learned about Web Scraping and Web Crawling. Both of them are used for different purposes for the website. However, there are a lot of differences between them. Web Scraping is a way through which the website data is exported into XML, whereas Web Crawling is used to crawl the pages published by the website.
However, these are not only the main differences but also some other points you should know about. This post will list the differences between Web Scraping and Web Crawling. If you want to know more about both terms, be with us till the end. You can also check the difference between a Rendering Engine and Browser Engine.
What is Web Scraping?
Web Scraping is a way to extract massive data from websites and export it to our local machine in XML and/or SQL format. To do this technique, the Web Scraper tool is used.
The primary purpose of using Web Scraping is to help develop machine learning, etc. The working of Web Scraping is straightforward. Following are the steps which are followed during the Web Scraping.
- First, the tool sends a request to the target website from which it has to extract the data.
- After it, the response is received from the website.
- The tool parses and extracts the response.
- After it, the data is downloaded.
What is Web Crawling?
Web Crawling is a technique through which the Crawler visits every site to index new pages, posts, etc., to update it on the Search Engine. The Crawler helps the Search Engine categorize the best results for the users. It mainly indexes the pages. The tool analyzes and checks for changes even if any pages are updated.
However, everything is done with the help of the tool Crawler. Along with the Crawler, the website uses another tool to put the link on the sitemap page. The Crawler visits the sitemap page and, after it, checks for the links and changes.
Difference Between Web Scraping and Web Crawling
Here are the differences between Web Scraping and Crawling that you should know.
| Web Scraping | Web Crawling |
|---|---|
| It is a technique through which the data are extracted from the website. | It is a technique through which the crawler index the pages for the search engine to improve the search results for the users. |
| Web Scraping is done with the help of the Scraper Tool. | The Crawling is done with the help of the Crawler. |
| Small and large-scale companies use Web Scraping. | Crawling is mainly used in large-scale companies. |
| For Scraping, the tool requires a parser and crawl agents. | It only requires crawl agents. |
| Web Scraper.io is used for Scraping. | Google, Yahoo, and Bing use Web Crawling. |
Conclusion
That’s it; this is the brief difference between Web Scraping and Web Crawling. You can also check out the differences between Edge Computing and Cloud Computing.
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