Stories from the Web Crawling trenches in crawling

Can I crawl any website?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 20, 2024

When creating a web crawler, it is important to respect websites' permissions and crawl ethically. The Robots Exclusion Protocol and proper identification of the crawler are key factors. Legal risks can be avoided by obtaining explicit permission from website owners.

Scrapy vs BeautifulSoup: How to Choose the Right Web Scraping Tool

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

Scrapy and BeautifulSoup are popular Python tools for web scraping. Scrapy is optimized for large-scale crawling and structured data extraction, while BeautifulSoup is better for targeted data extraction from specific pages. Combining both libraries can leverage their respective strengths.

BeautifulSoup vs Scrapy: A Web Scraper's Experience-Based Comparison

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Jan 9, 2024

Web scraping with BeautifulSoup and Scrapy: parsing vs crawling, JavaScript rendering, and data extraction. Combine tools for successful scraping.

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