Web Scraping (also termed Screen Scraping, Web Data Extraction, Web Harvesting etc) is a technique employed to extract large amounts of data from websites.
Data from third party websites in the Internet can normally be viewed only using a web browser. Examples are data listings at yellow pages directories, real estate sites, social networks, industrial inventory, online shopping sites, contact databases etc. Most websites do not offer the functionality to save a copy of the data which they display to your local storage. The only option then is to manually copy and paste the data displayed by the website in your browser to a local file in your computer - a very tedious job which can take many hours or sometimes days to complete.
Web Scraping is the technique of automating this process, so that instead of manually copying the data from websites, the Web Scraping software will perform the same task within a fraction of the time.
A Web Scraping software will interact with websites in the same way as your web browser. But instead of displaying the data served by the website on screen, the Web Scraping software saves the required data from the web page to a local file or database.
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