People often confuse data mining with web scraping, the confusion is only natural, as both the procedures include the extraction of data to yield valuable information, but the truth is that they both are quite different from each other.
The nature of both data mining and web scraping is different. In this blog, we are going to talk all about the differences between web scraping and data mining, along with their purposes.
What Is Data Mining?
The process of harvesting data from multiple sources available on the internet is called data mining. To harvest data, one may use several methods, depending on the volume and the time frame they have to harvest it.
The motive of data mining is to collect credible data for studies. The data is then segregated, analysed and classified after evaluation. There is no solid “Right way” to collect data, as long as you are providing proper credits and as long as the data is legal to mine.
Some Uses Of Data Mining
- Analysing the data and finding a pattern
- Market Basket Analysis
- Customer Relationship Management
- For cybersecurity to find a pattern of cyberattacks, crimes etc.
- Helps businesses make informed decisions
What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is a process of extracting the whole human-readable data (basically, content) of a website that has been woven in a particular programming language, into another form of data that is convenient for you.
Some Uses Of web scraping
- Research for web content/business intelligence price comparison sites.
- Finding sales leads/conducting market research by crawling public data sources.
- Sending product data from an e-commerce site to another online vendor.
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Now, if you are wondering how these two are interconnected, go ahead, and read a little further, that’s what we are going to explain in this blog.
Supposedly, you need a particular sort of data in a particular format from various websites, and the amount of data on each website is enormous. What is your best option to do it without wasting time and saving you a lot of effort? Web scraping is the answer. With the help of a scraping tool that suits your need, you will be able to get the data in no time.
When you collect such a huge amount of data, it is known as data mining, such a large amount of data is generally extracted for analysis and get some valuable information out of it. This is how web scraping and mining can be used together.
Many cybersecurity providers use them both together for the above-mentioned purpose, and so do other organizations and associations when they need to collect a huge amount of data from the internet for surveys.
Conclusion
Web scraping is just an extraction method, and it may be used as a process of data mining for the collection of a large amount of data in a short period with proper tools.
The confusion between data mining and web scraping is because of some sim ilar terms of usage. Hopefully, this blog has helped you solve your confusion. The only thing to keep in mind is that the data being collected should be properly credited in case of data mining and legal to collect in case of web scraping. The legality should be emphasized because some websites have bots who may identify your scraping tool and the process as a DDOS (Direct Denial Of Services) attack.
To prevent yourself from such an anomaly, make sure not to venture into the grey area of mining or scraping.