Web Scraping Intro
A complete beginner-friendly introduction to web scraping: what it is, why it exists, how it works, its history, benefits, risks, and future.
Web scraping means: **automatically collecting data from websites using code instead of copying by hand.** If a website shows: - product prices - news articles - job listings - sports scores and you want that data in your program or database, you use web scraping. ## Why web scraping exists Before scraping: - people copied data manually - very slow and error-prone With scraping: - computers fetch pages - extract only what you need - store it automatically This saves hours or days of work. ## Simple real examples - Track product prices daily - Collect jobs from job portals - Monitor news headlines - Gather data for research - Build datasets for AI models ## When did it become popular Web scraping started becoming common: - in early 2000s with search engines - grew fast with Python libraries like BeautifulSoup - exploded with data science and AI after 2015 Today, scraping is a core skill for: - data engineers - analysts - backend developers - researchers ## How scraping works (big picture) 1) Request a web page (like a browser) 2) Get HTML code 3) Find elements you need 4) Extract text/links/images 5) Save data ## Graph: scraping flow ```mermaid flowchart LR A[Python Script] --> B[Send HTTP Request] B --> C[Website Server] C --> D[HTML Response] D --> E[Parse HTML] E --> F[Extract Data] F --> G[Save to File/DB] ``` ## Is scraping legal? It depends: - Public data is usually allowed - Respect robots.txt - Do not overload servers - Do not scrape private/logged-in data - Follow site terms Always scrape **responsibly**. ## Why use Python for scraping Python is popular because: - simple syntax - powerful libraries - huge community - easy data processing ## Future of web scraping Scraping is still growing because: - more data-driven systems - AI needs large datasets - businesses depend on live data But: - sites are adding anti-bot systems - scrapers must become smarter - APIs will replace some scraping So learning scraping now is still very valuable. ## Remember - Scraping = automatic data collection from web - Saves time and builds datasets - Python is the best beginner choice - Always scrape ethically