Web scraping is a method of using a scraping bot for extracting the data or content from the website. Contrasting screen scraping that make a copy of pixels shown, web scraping take out underlies HTML code and with it, data is stock up in the folder. Scraper can photocopy the website content entirely. Web scraping is used in ranges of digital business which depends on the harvesting of the data. Legal use includes-
- Search engine bot crawling site, examining the content and ranking it
- Market research companies use scrapers for pulling data from forums and social media
- Price comparison site deploys bots to auto-fetch costs and product information for associated seller sites
Website scraping is used for unlawful reasons including undercutting of the prices and robbery of the patent content. The online entity targeted by scraper may experience severe financial losses particularly if the business relies on the competitive pricing model or deals in the distribution of the content.
Scraper bot and tool-
Web scraping tools are the software that is a scraper bot that is programmed to sort through the database and extract details. A range of scraper bot types used and many are customized to-
- Store the scrape data
- Identify the HTML site structures
- Extract data through APIs
- Extract and alter the content
Since all available scraper bot is having the same purpose, to access website information, it can be tough to differentiate between malicious and legal bots.
With that being said, several difference helps in differentiating-
01- Legal scraper bot is recognized with the organization for which they scratch.
02- Legal bots stand for robot.txt file of a site that lists the pages a bot is allowed to access and those it can’t. On the other side, malicious scrapers crawls the site despite what the site operator has permitted.
The resource must run a web scraper bot that is substantial so much that legal scraping bot operators invest heavily in servers to process a huge sum of data being obtained.
A doer, deficient such a funds chooses to the using the botnet, geologically isolated computers contaminated with the same malware and controlled from a central zone. Individual botnet PC owners are not alert if their partaking. The combined power of the infected systems allows the huge scale scraping of numerous websites by the doer.
Web scraping is considered to be malicious when they obtained data with no permission from the owners of the site. The common use cases are content theft and price scraping.