What is the difference between web scraping and data scraping?

When people talk about extracting or collecting data from the internet or databases, the terms "web scraping" and "data scraping" often get used interchangeably. However, while related, these two data extraction techniques have some distinct differences.

Defining the Terms

Web scraping refers specifically to extracting data from websites. This usually involves writing a script or program to crawl through web pages, parse their HTML/CSS code, and extract relevant information like text, images, links or files into a structured format like a spreadsheet.

Data scraping is a more general term for systematically extracting data from any online source - whether a database, API or yes - even websites. The key difference is data scraping targets more varied data sources beyond just websites.

Key Differences

Here are some other notable ways web scraping and data scraping differ:

Overlapping Use Cases

There are many cases like scraping company directories, ecommerce sites or social media where techniques and tools used for web scraping and data scraping overlap significantly. The core difference lies in whether the target data source is specifically a website or a database/API.

In summary, web scraping focuses just on extracting data from web pages while data scraping has a broader definition - any systematic extraction of data from an online source. But in practice these advanced data collection techniques share many methods and use cases.