Web scraping refers to the extraction of data from a website, where the information is collected and then exported into a format that is more useful for the users, e.g. a spreadsheet or an API (
Perez, 2023
).
Web scraping is used to scape data from webpages automatically on large scale, where it is performed to convert data in complex HTML structures to structured format as a spreadsheet or database, which later used for various purposes such as research, analysis, and automation (
Dhanashree, 2023
).
Search engines like Google scrape the web to index sites and provide them as results for users’ queries (
Martinez, 2023
).
legality
There is no law or rule banning web scraping, but it does not mean every information on every webs can be scaped (
Urban, 2023
).
There is nothing inherently illegal about web scraping, since when a website publishes data, it is usually available to the public, and as a result, free to scrape (
Holcombe, 2023
).
Web scraping is actually not illegal on its own but one should be ethical while doing it, since when it is done in a good way it can help us to make the best use of the web, e.g. search engine like Google (
madhur912, 2023
).