Octoparse-web scraping

  In recent years, big data has become the new gold and led the trends of data collection and data analysis. Web scraping or web data extraction has become a popular way for collecting web data. While being well recognized for its flexibility and adaptability, this new technology has helped many individuals and businesses to retrieve loads of data from nearly all websites or databases. However, web scraping is not as welcome for website owners on the hand. It can increase heavy loads of traffic to the websites’ servers which can potentially crash the sites in the worst scenarios. As a result, with new technologies being developed for web scraping, the means of defense against it has become more sophisticated as well. The most common way to fight back web scraping is to limit the access rate of any single IP. A web scraper that has made too many requests in a short period of time using a single IP address can be easily detected, and sooner or later get blocked by the target website....

Screen scraping  is a  data collecting  technique usually used to copy information that shows on a digital display so it can be used for another purpose. In this article, we will introduce the process of screen scraping and how a  screen scraper  works. Screen Scraping Normally associated with the programmatic collection of visual data from a source, screen scraping usually refers to the practice of reading text data from a computer display terminal’s screen. As the method of collecting screen display data from one application and translating it so that another application is able to display it, screen scraping is normally done to capture visual data from a legacy application in order to display it using a more modern user interface. Why is screen scraping usually used for transferring data? “Under normal circumstances, a legacy application is either replaced by a new program or brought up to date by rewriting the source code. In some cases, it is desirable to c...

Originally published as https://www.octoparse.com/blog/what-is-a-web-crawler-and-how-does-it-work-at-your-benefit/?blogger= on March 28, 2022. A web crawler, also known as a web spider or search engine bot, is a bot that visits and indexes the content of web pages all over the Internet. With such an enormous amount of information, a search engine will be able to present its users' relevant information in the search results. What is a Web Crawler? The goal of a web crawler is to get information, often keep getting fresh information to fuel a search engine. If a search engine is a supermarket, what a web crawler does is like grand sourcing — it visits different websites/web pages, browses, and has the information stored in its own warehouse. When a customer comes over and asks for something, there will be certain goods to offer on the shelves. It sources by  indexing  web pages and the content they contain. The indexed content will be ready for retrieval and when a user searche...