As asserted by Forbes, many things in our lives will be considerably different by 2025, as constantly changing digital reality will bring new challenges and risks. Information was always a powerful tool, but it will become even more valuable in the future. What does it mean to us? First of all, we should learn more about new technologies that involve data mining. Today, we will talk about web scraping and web crawling as many people confuse these two approaches.

Web scraping or web crawling?

Let’s start at the very beginning. Web scraping is a method, used to extract data from various sources. Then the information is arranged in easy-to-use formats. Web scraping service providers usually offer a wide range of opportunities, such as price monitoring, brand tracking, and collecting data for research.

Web crawling works like a spider, and it is applied primarily to websites. Web spider (crawler) accesses a site and checks all web pages to arrange entries for search engine index.

Which one is better?

Although web scraping and web crawling use similar techniques, the results can be a bit different. However, it doesn’t mean that one tool is worse than another. Your decision should be based on the needs of your company.

Here are a few things to know about their features.

1. Scraping doesn’t cover all the pages of the website while crawling checks everything to the last page.

2. Data deduplication is a necessary element of data crawling. It helps not to overload the customers’ workstations. Web scraping doesn’t imply deduplication.

3. Web crawling is aimed to index the content of websites on the net, thus they become available in search engine results.

4. Web crawling works better on a large scale, while web scraping is efficient on both large and small scales.