Web scrapping simple put is just a way to programmable get data from a website. Every business, product, and even your small personal side projects need data. Data drives everything and there are many great databases with user friendly APIs but sometimes when you need very large amounts of data or when there is no existing database, you will have to use a web scrapper to fill your database, as someone likely did before you till fill the databases you already use. Web scrapping allows to make a perfectly customizable API for whatever project you are working on, if you just want an email alert every time a job comes up all these app are made easy with web scrapping the time you take now to automate something will save a lot of time in the future.
Basic web scrapping is a lot easier than you think, like previously stated data is always needed and therefore web scrapping is extremely popular and with popularity comes a lot of tools that make it easier to web scrape. The first and foremost step of web scrapping is to find the data you need, search for particular site with whatever data you are looking for. Be careful though web scrapping can become a headache fast if a site is unorganized and HTML elements are reused in illogical ways that can render your web scrapper useless, especially if you are using a web crawler, just moving between a lot of pages on the site; if you are just pull data from one page as it updates on the site then as long as the web page isn’t horrifically designed you should be okay. With that being said things to look for in a site are consistent pages that you can pull the data from a few selected HTML elements across multiple pages with having to go through manually each time. If you are trying to pull articles from a website but the HTML elements are used all over the place and requires you to check the data each time so you don’t accidently pull the comment section, then you might want to look elsewhere. Make sure that the routing of the site is logical, you want to make sure that the routing around the site is logical, if you click on someone’s an article on the site and the address bar says something like http://www.news.com/articles/headline but when you click on another article and the address bar says something like http://www.news.com/posts-articles23/headline. Then you might have a problem if there is no discernable logic beside poor programming then this is most likely a site that is not worth the extra time and effort to scrape from. Overall these are just a few tips before you start scrapping that you will pick up on pretty fast. Just use your inspect tool in your DevTools and do some poking around and you should be able to figure out pretty fast if the site is a good fit for you. I hope this was helpful I’ll link a list some scarping tools down below for you to decide which one is best.
Sources
I Feel All Sorts of Ways About Programming 