Business Commons^™

Web Scraping The Easy Way, Yolande Neil

Honors College Theses

Web scraping refers to a software program that mimics human web surfing behavior by pointing to a website and collecting large amounts of data that would otherwise be difficult for a human to extract. A typical program will extract both unstructured and semi-structured data, as well as images, and convert the data into a structured format. Web scraping is commonly used to facilitate online price comparisons, aggregate contact information, extract online product catalog data, extract economic/demographic/statistical data, and create web mashups, among other uses. Additionally, in the era of big data, semantic analysis, and business intelligence, web scraping is the …