Web scraping is the process of gathering information from the Internet. Even copy-pasting the lyrics of your favorite song is a form of web scraping! However, the words “web scraping” usually refer to a process that involves automation.
If you’re scraping a page respectfully for educational purposes, then you’re unlikely to have any problems. Still, it’s a good idea to do some research on your own and make sure that you’re not violating any Terms of Service before you start a large-scale project.
When you try to get the information you want manually, you might spend a lot of time clicking, scrolling, and searching. This is especially true if you need large amounts of data from websites that are regularly updated with new content. Manual web scraping can take a lot of time and repetition.
Thankfully, the world offers other ways to apply that surfer’s mindset! Instead of looking at the job site every day, you can use Python to help automate the repetitive parts of your job search. Automated web scraping can be a solution to speed up the data collection process. You write your code once and it will get the information you want many times and from many pages.
Some website providers offer Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow you to access their data in a predefined manner. With APIs, you can avoid parsing HTML and instead access the data directly using formats like JSON and XML. HTML is primarily a way to visually present content to users.