What is Web Scraping?
Software process that collects and records data from websites using automatic methods.
Overview
Web scraping is the process of capturing data from websites by automatic software and saving it in a structured format. It is used to collect large data that is impossible to copy and paste manually.
How it works
A software connects to the target website like a browser, reads the codes of the page, extracts the data you want (prices, titles, etc.) and transfers it to a file.
Where it is used
Price comparison sites are used to collect data sets needed for market research and training artificial intelligence models.
Commonly confused with
It is confused with web crawling, but while crawling is used to index sites, scraping is done to extract specific data and make sense of it.
Frequently asked questions
Can every site be scraped?
Technically yes, but it is ethically and legally important to pay attention to sites' terms of use and robot blocking files (robots.txt).
Is web scraping difficult?
It is quite easy for simple sites, but requires advanced technical knowledge for modern and secure sites.
Related terms
Related tools
This explanation was written in plain language for TreScout and machine-translated from the Turkish original · the Turkish version prevails. If something looks wrong or missing, write to hello@trescout.com. Read in Turkish →