Scraping versus crawling
Depending on the information you are after and the site content and structure, you may need to either build a web scraper or a website crawler. What is the difference?
A web scraper is usually built to target a particular website or sites and to garner specific information on those sites. A web scraper is built to access these specific pages and will need to be modified if the site changes or if the information location on the site is changed. For example, you might want to build a web scraper to check the daily specials at your favorite local restaurant, and to do so you would scrape the part of their site where they regularly update that information.
In contrast, a web crawler is usually built in a generic way; ...
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