What are the differences between web crawling and web scraping?

What are the differences between web crawling and web scraping?


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I usually think of crawling as finding and indexing pages, while scraping is grabbing specific data from those pages. You can crawl without scraping, but scraping often needs crawling first.

I ran into the same confusion a while back. One thing that helped me understand the scraping part better was submitting a form with playwright—it let me mimic how users interact with search forms on websites, like filling inputs and clicking buttons. Then I could scrape the result page. Crawling is more like going from link to link without needing that kind of interaction.

Web crawling indexes web pages by systematically browsing the internet, while web scraping extracts specific data from web pages for analysis or use. Crawling gathers URLs, scraping collects content.

A web crawler is an automated process of systematically searching the web to index content for search engines, in the same way Google gathers and updates information about websites. On the other hand, web scraping involves extracting specific information from web pages, often for data analysis or business purposes. The purpose of crawling is to discover and index pages, while the purpose of scraping is to extract specific information. Bots are used by both parties, but for different purposes and with different ethical considerations.

Web crawling is the process of automatically browsing the web to index content, while web scraping involves extracting specific data from websites, usually after crawling or targeting specific pages.

Web crawling is the process of automatically browsing websites to index content, while web scraping involves extracting specific data from websites for analysis, often after crawling.

Web crawling is about discovering and indexing web pages, mainly used by search engines like Google. Web scraping, on the other hand, focuses on extracting specific data from web pages. Crawling gathers page URLs; scraping pulls actual content like prices, names, or text from those pages.