What is Web Scraping and Is It Legal in India?

web scrapping

Vidhi Punamiya

Sep 18, 2021 — 9 min read

Web scraping or extracting data has existed for a long time and has become quite important for constantly building new products. Almost all bloggers and online entrepreneurs know about Web scraping. But bad bots cause 20% of all web traffic and perform a variety of harmful activities through web scraping.

Yet, web scraping, if used in a good way, can be a useful technology. So, here's everything that one needs to about Web Scraping and Web Scraping Tools. Good bots enable search engines to index web content, price comparison services to save consumers money.

Yet, Bad bots fetch content from a website with the intent of using it for purposes outside the site owner’s control such as competitive data mining, online fraud, account hijacking, data theft, spam and digital ad fraud. While many web scraping companies in India like Eminenture provide top-notch Web Scraping services.

Is web scraping legal in India? Yes, at one point in time web scrapping was once considered illegal in India. Don’t worry if you consider yourself an entrepreneur, but still don’t know about web scraping software. So let's take a leap of faith and get deep into the world of web scraping and keep reading to find out whether web scraping is legal or not in India.

What is Web Scrapping?
Is Web Scraping Legal in India?
Uses of Web Scraping
Limitations of Web Scraping
Best Tools for Web Scraping
Different Types of Web Scrapping
FAQ

What is Web Scrapping?

Also known as Screen Scraping or Web Harvesting, Web scraping is a technique to extract data from websites. The data collected save directly on your computer. Web scraping provides you with the data of another website that can be used to promote your own business or sell it to others.

It is usually done by making bots, but nowadays, many web scraping software is available to do this job. However, you can also do this by gathering and saving the specific data of the websites into your computer manually, but only if you can wait forever.

Hence, web-scraping software does this job in a fraction of time. Python is often used for web scraping because python has a huge collection of libraries.

Is Web Scraping Legal in India?

When it comes to whether web scraping legal or illegal, it is the biggest query people have about web scraping. However, most websites do not allow people to web scrap their websites. And why would they want to? They may not include this information on the home page, of course, but they do write about this in their Terms and Conditions section.

There is no legal statement out there against web scraping, however, if they write about it on their website, they can file a case against you, this is why there are many web scraping legal cases. Although it varies from country to country.

Uses of Web Scraping

Finding & Understanding Customers

You can find the list of your potential customers by web scraping. Also, you can check on their buying behaviour, reviews of competitor’s products, trends in the market and the demand of customers, etc. Many web scraping services in India include finding information in order to understand their customers.

Public Opinion

Don’t estimate the people’s opinions yourself. By web-scraping, you can check what people think of some particular type of product. Many Web scrapping projects are available to help you to make your product according to their needs.

Price Analysis

If you think you are overcharging your customers or you think your price is too low, then you can web scrape the competitor’s website. It will help you to finalize the price of your product.

Scrape Leads

Web scraping can generate leads for you. You can extract data about some investors and reach out directly to them. Moreover, you can reach out to customers and pitch your product through emails. Some web scraping tools, like Python, are preferred languages used for scraping because Scrapy and Beautiful Soup are two of the most used frameworks which are based on Python.

Competitor Analysis

As told before, you can scrape the competitor’s website for many purposes. You can even analyze their full website, understand their strategy and make some pretty plans for your company. Analyzing competitors and customers is an important part of any business. For example, Scrape food delivery data can help you with your competitors, food delivery apps, and associated businesses.

SEO

You can scrape data from higher-ranked websites. After that, you can analyze their SEO strategy and rank yourself higher. However, you have to analyze all of the top websites to create your SEO strategy.

Limitations of Web Scraping

Difficult to Analyze

You might get the data from web scraping easily, but it is very difficult to organize and analyze the collected data. You may even need to hire some experts for this task. Many web scraping services in India take a lot of time and are difficult to analyse as it is fairly new in the country.

Time

It takes a lot of time to scrape a website that has a lot of web pages. Sometimes, it even takes months to scrape the data from a website. So, it’s just impossible to web scrape data of some old players in the game, like websites of Flipkart or Amazon to analyze their strategy, this is why you can also extract data from Flipkart.

Protection Policy

Most of the websites these days include some bots on their websites so that no one can web scrape their data. Also, as mentioned before, many websites already state web scraping on their Terms and Conditions’ page. Since scraping legality is not certain, many companies may or may not have a protection policy.

Best Tools for Web Scraping

One of the best web scraping tools is Python, but besides that, these are some of the other tools that can be used for Web Scraping.

Spinn3r - This tool is for bloggers. It is a web service for indexing the blogosphere. It gives raw access to every blog ever been published in a short time.
Dexi.io - It enables the business to automatically and rapidly extract large scale data from any accessible web and cloud services. Dexi.io is one of the few web scraping tools that are free.
Octoparse - It is a modern visual web data extraction software that turns websites into structured data without coding. Octoparse is a free tool.
Scrapy - Scrappy is another free and open-source web crawling framework written in python. It is one of the popular web scraping tools, as it was originally designed to extract data but also used for APIs or web - crawlers.
Diffbot - It is a developer of machine learning and computer vision algorithms and public APIs for extracting data from web pages (web scraping).
Content Grabber - This app can extract data from any website. It is used for web-scraping and web automation.
ScrappingHub - It is a free and open-source web crawling framework written in Python.
Data Scrapper - It extracts data out of HTML web pages and imports it into Microsoft excel.
cURL - It is a computer software project providing a library and command-line tool for transferring data using various protocols.
Data toolbar - It is a web scraping computer software add-on the Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome Web browser that collects and converts data from web pages into a tabular format that can be uploaded to a spreadsheet or database management program.

Different Types of Web Scrapping

Web scrappers usually come in four different types are Self-built or Pre-built Web Scrapers, Browser extension or Software Web Scrapers, and Cloud or Local Web Scrapers.

Self-built or Prebuilt web scrapers - These web scrapers require an advanced level of knowledge on programming, as they are customized and are not web scrapers that you can run and download.
Browser extension web scrapers - These web scrapers are extensions that can be added to your browsers and are easy to run compared to Self-built ones. The web scrapping extension is popular but, advanced features cannot be run on these scrappers.
Software Web Scrapers - These web scrapers can easily be downloaded and run on your laptop as there is a slightly complex version of Browser extension web scrapers. Unlike Browser web scrapers they have advanced features.
Cloud Web Scrapers - Cloud Web scrapers only run on the cloud which is usually provided by the company that you buy this particular scraper from. This scraper allows your laptop or PC to focus on other tasks as computer resources are not required for this type of Scraper.
Local Web scrapers - Local Web scrapers can be easily downloaded and run on your laptop or PC using local resources but they do require more CPU or RAM, which will make your computer slow.

Conclusion

You can do web scraping yourself if you think you can handle and analyze the data, or you can just hire a freelancer. So is data scraping legal in India? Yes but, some people say that web scraping is not a very ethical practice to do. Moreover, they say that we always pay for it in the future. However, we support neither of them.

We brought you both, the advantages and the web scraping limitations. Our job was to scrape the information and get them to you. We leave the decision of using web scraping or not, on you.

FAQ

What is email scraping?

Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.

How useful is web scraping?

Web scraping can help you extract any kind of data that you want. You would then be able to retrieve, analyze and use the data the way you want. So web scraping simplifies the process of extracting data, speeds it up by automating it and creates easy access to the scrapped data by providing it in a CSV format.

How much does web scraping cost?

Your server costs are likely to be lower, but you can still expect anywhere between $500-$2000/month for any real scale in your data volume. If you're scraping data from 5 or more websites, expect 1 of those websites to require a complete overhaul each month.

What is Web scraping in Python?

Web scraping is a use of a program or algorithm to extract and process large amounts of data from the web. Python is used for web scraping because it has a large number of libraries. The syntax in python is easy to understand and readable.

What is web scraping used for?

Unlike screen scraping, which only copies pixels displayed onscreen, web scraping extracts underlying HTML code and, with it, data stored in a database.

Is web scraping legal in India?

Yes, web scraping is legal as Big MNC companies in some countries including India use web scrapers for their own gain but also don't want others to use bots against them.

What is a web scraping example?

Web scraping refers to the extraction of web data into a format that is more useful for the user. For example, when people crape product information from an eCommerce website onto an excel spreadsheet.

What is required for web scraping?

There are four key parts to every web scraping project: Data discovery, Data extraction, Extraction scale.

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