

Web scrapers typically take something out of a page, to make use of it for another purpose somewhere else. The content of a page may be parsed, searched and reformatted, and its data copied into a spreadsheet or loaded into a database. Therefore, web crawling is a main component of web scraping, to fetch pages for later processing. Fetching is the downloading of a page (which a browser does when a user views a page). Scraping a web page involves fetching it and extracting from it. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites.

For broader coverage of this topic, see Data scraping.
