Yo! Web crawling vs scraping is all about the approach.
Crawling = discovering pages (like a bot)
Scraping = extracting data from those pages
If you’ve got the URLs, skip crawling. If not, you’ll need both.
Legal? It’s a minefield. Some sites are cool, others will block you fast. Use proxies and delays.
Tools: Scrapy is king, but Puppeteer is great for JS-heavy sites.
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Wow, thanks everyone! This clears up a lot about web crawling vs scraping. I think I’ll start with scraping since I already have the product URLs.
Gonna try BeautifulSoup first—seems easiest for my skill level.
Quick follow-up: Anyone know a good free proxy service to avoid getting blocked? Or should I just throttle my requests?
Appreciate all the help!
Crawling = discovering pages (like a bot)
Scraping = extracting data from those pages
If you’ve got the URLs, skip crawling. If not, you’ll need both.
Legal? It’s a minefield. Some sites are cool, others will block you fast. Use proxies and delays.
Tools: Scrapy is king, but Puppeteer is great for JS-heavy sites.
---
Wow, thanks everyone! This clears up a lot about web crawling vs scraping. I think I’ll start with scraping since I already have the product URLs.
Gonna try BeautifulSoup first—seems easiest for my skill level.
Quick follow-up: Anyone know a good free proxy service to avoid getting blocked? Or should I just throttle my requests?
Appreciate all the help!