Scraping vs Crawling: Key Differences
Ever wondered how Google finds every webpage out there, or how a price comparison site gathers data from dozens of online stores? The answer lies in two distinct techniques: web crawling and web scraping. These terms often get mixed up, but they actually refer to different processes. In short, web scraping is about extracting specific data from websites, whereas web crawling is focused on discovering and indexing pages across the web. Both are essential in the world of data gathering, but they serve different purposes. Let’s dive into what each one means and how they differ, in a way that’s clear even for a non-developer yet detailed enough for a technical reader.