Web Scraping
The automated extraction of data from websites — fetching pages programmatically and parsing their content into structured data.
Full Definition
Web scraping is the automated process of sending HTTP requests to websites, downloading the HTML (or intercepting API responses), parsing the content to locate specific data fields, and storing the result in a structured format like JSON, CSV, or a database. It ranges from simple scripts fetching a single page to complex, distributed systems handling millions of pages per day across rotating proxy pools. Common use cases include price monitoring, lead generation, market research, news aggregation, SEO analysis, and real-estate data collection. The legal and ethical dimensions vary by jurisdiction and the site's terms of service.
