Web scraping, also known as web data extraction or web harvesting, is the process of automatically extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. The process involves fetching a web page, which is the downloading of a page, and extracting data from it. Once fetched, the content of a page may be parsed, searched, reformatted, and its data copied into a spreadsheet or loaded into a database. Web scraping is used to obtain large amounts of data from websites, which can be used in various applications. Some of the most common use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, and market research.

Web scrapers are specialized tools designed to accurately and quickly extract data from a web page. They vary greatly in design and complexity, and web data scraping tools also vary widely in design and complexity, depending on the project. Web scraping tools collect and export extracted data for in-depth analysis, typically into a central local database, spreadsheet, or API.

Web scraping is a valuable tool for businesses and individuals who want to make use of publicly available web data to generate valuable insights and make smarter decisions. However, some websites use methods to prevent web scraping, such as detecting and disallowing bots from crawling their pages. In response, there are web scraping systems that rely on using techniques in DOM parsing, computer vision, and natural language processing to simulate human browsing to enable gathering web page content for offline parsing.

In summary, web scraping is the process of automatically mining data or collecting information from the World Wide Web, and it is a field with active developments.