What is Web Scraping: Introduction, Applications and Best Practices

However, manually copy data from multiple sources for retrieval in a central place can be very tedious and time-consuming. "Web scraping," also called crawling or spidering, is the automated gathering of data from an online source usually from a website. While scraping is a great way to get massive amounts of data in relatively short timeframes, it does add stress to the server where the source hosted. However, as long as it does not disrupt the primary function of the online source, it is relatively acceptable. Despite its legal challenges, web scraping remains popular even in 2019.