DEV Community

Shahidul Islam
Shahidul Islam

Posted on

2 1

Facts about Web Scraping

Data science has become a crucial technology in today's business.

Web scraping is one of the essential parts of data source for data science. Here is some point on the facts about web scraping.

  1. Web scraping means pulling data from the internet on a database with the help of a bot. If you are just copy-pasting, it won't be called web scraping.

  2. Although our intuitions say that web scraping is illegal, it is legal to scrape publically available data. See the article https://tinyurl.com/2hbrjcwm. Although if the data is behind the login page, it might be unlawful to scrape.

  3. There are two types of ways you can do web scraping. One is by coding, which is free, and the second is by using third party web scraping services. We use both of them equally.

  4. Most common programming language used is python. And the packages that are primarily used are BeautifulSoup, requests, scrapy etc.

  5. The most used tools are ParseHub, OctoParse, Scraper API, etc. They all have unique features and different price points.

  6. Although web scraping is excellent, there are some challenges. Bot access, IP blocking, Captcha, Honeypot traps, Login requirement, and Dynamic content, to name a few, are the challenges that have to be mitigated for smooth scraping.

If you like this writing, please give a follow.

Image of Timescale

🚀 pgai Vectorizer: SQLAlchemy and LiteLLM Make Vector Search Simple

We built pgai Vectorizer to simplify embedding management for AI applications—without needing a separate database or complex infrastructure. Since launch, developers have created over 3,000 vectorizers on Timescale Cloud, with many more self-hosted.

Read more →

Top comments (0)

A Workflow Copilot. Tailored to You.

Pieces.app image

Our desktop app, with its intelligent copilot, streamlines coding by generating snippets, extracting code from screenshots, and accelerating problem-solving.

Read the docs