A Brief Introduction to the Web Scraping Bot

Web scraping is the method of using a web scraping bot for extracting the content and information via websites. Unlike screen scraping that just copies pixels displayed onscreen, web scraping extracts underlying HTML code and with it, information stored into the database. The scraper then can duplicate the whole website content.

Website scraping service is used in ranges of digital business which relies on the information harvesting. Legal uses include the following-

· Price comparison sites that deploy the bot to auto-fetch cots and product information for the allied seller websites

· A search engine bot crawls a website, examining the content and then ranking the same.

· Market research companies use scrapers to pull the data through social media and forums.

Also, website scraping service is used for an illegal purpose, inclusive of undercutting of prices and the pilfering of copyrighted information. The online entity targeted by a scraper can suffer severe financial loss, particularly if is the business strongly depending on the competitive costing models or deals in the content distribution.

Scraper tools and bots-

Web scraping tools are the software or bots which are programmed to sift via databases and extract information. Ranges of bot types are used and numerous being completely customizable to-

· Figure out unique HTML structures

· Acquire and alter the content

· Obtain data from APIs

· Store scraped data

Since numerous web scraping bot are having the same purpose, to access the website content, it can be harder to differentiate between malicious and legitimate bots.

And that being said, several key differences help in differentiating between two-

Legal bots are recognized by the organization for which they scrape. For instance, Google bot recognizes itself in its HTTP header as belonging to Google. Malicious bot impersonates legitimate traffic by setting up false HTTP user agent.

Legal web scraping bot stands for a website’s robot.txt file that lists those pages that a bot is allowed to access and those it can’t. Malicious scrapers crawl the site regardless of what is being permitted by the site operator.

Resources are required for running a web scraper bot are considerable so much so the legal scraping bot operators can heavily invest into the server for processing the huge amount of data being obtained.

A doer, lacking such a budget, often resorts to using botnet- geographically dispersed PCs, infected with the same malware and managed from the central locations. Individual botnet PC owners are not aware of the participation.

The combined power of infected systems enables huge scale scraping of ranges of websites by doers.