Scrape is a technique that is used to copy the content or specific information from a site. This process is carried out using a computer program or script. In most cases, search engines like Google use bots to fetch content from a site.
This type of scraping differs from screen scraping because with the latter only the pixels that are displayed on the screen are copied. When web-scraping extracts the main HTML code, as well as all the data that is stored in the database. Then you can copy all the content from the site to another location.
This method is popular with digital companies that collect data. This process has various forms, the main ones are:
- Search engine bots crawl a site, then analyze the content of that site, and then rank it.
- Bots are used to automatically retrieve prices and product descriptions. This approach is used by price comparison sites.
- Parcels are used to extract data from various forums and social networks to analyze the mood of users on certain issues. Market research companies use it
Scrapes can also often be used to conduct illegal transactions. This includes content theft and underpricing, which are copyrighted. In this case, the company targeted by such a process can incur huge financial losses if the business is very dependent on content distribution or competitive prices.
