One of our favorite quotes has been, ‘If a problem changes by an order, it becomes a different problem’, and in this lies the answer to – Data Crawling vs Data Scraping.
Data Crawling means dealing with large data sets where you develop your crawlers (or bots) which crawl to the deepest of the web pages. Data scraping, on the other hand, refers to retrieving information from any source (not necessarily the web). It’s more often the case that irrespective of the approaches involved, we refer to extracting data from the web as scraping (or harvesting) and that’s a serious misconception.
Data Crawling vs Data Scraping – Key Differences
1. Scraping data does not necessarily involve the web. Data scraping tools that help in data scraping could refer to extracting information from a local machine, a database. Even if it is from the internet, a mere “Save as” link on the page is also a subset of the data scraping universe.
Data crawling, on the other hand, differs immensely in scale as well as in range. Firstly, crawling = web crawling which means on the web, we can only “crawl” data. Programs that perform this incredible job are called crawl agents or bots or spiders (please leave the other spider in spiderman’s world).
Some web spiders are algorithmically designed to reach the maximum depth of a page and crawl them iteratively (did we ever say crawl?). While both seem different, web scraping vs web crawling is mostly the same.
2. The web is an open world and the quintessential practicing platform of our right to freedom. Thus a lot of content gets created and then duplicated. For instance, the same blog might be posted on different pages and our spiders don’t understand that.
Hence, data de-duplication (affectionately dedup) is an integral part of web data crawling service. This is done to achieve two things — to keep our clients happy by not flooding their machines with the same data more than once; and saving our servers some space. However, deduplication is not necessarily a part of web data scraping.
3. One of the most challenging things in the web crawling space is to deal with the coordination of successive crawls. Our spiders have to be polite with the servers so that they do not piss them off when hit. This creates an interesting situation to handle. Over some time, our spiders have to get more intelligent (and not crazy!).
They get to develop learning to know when and how much to hit a server, and how to crawl data feeds on its web pages while complying with its politeness policies. While both seem different, web scraping vs web crawling is mostly the same.
4. Finally, different crawl agents are used to crawling different websites, and hence you need to ensure they don’t conflict with each other in the process. This situation never arises when you intend to just crawl data.
| Data Scraping | Data Crawling |
|---|---|
| Involves extracting data from various sources including web | Refers to download pages from the web |
| Can be done at any scale | Mostly done at a large scale |
| Deduplication is not necessarily a part | Deduplication is an essential part |
| Needs crawl agent and parser | Needs only crawl agent |
On a concluding note, when talking about web scraping vs web crawling. ‘Scraping’ represents a very superficial node of crawling which we call extraction, and that again requires few algorithms and some automation in place.
