How is web scraping different from web crawling?

Answer

Web crawling is about discovering and fetching pages, while web scraping is about extracting data from those pages. Crawlers focus on link traversal, deduplication, and scheduling. Scrapers focus on selectors, parsing logic, and data quality. You often crawl to build a URL list, then scrape those pages. Both can be part of the same pipeline, but they solve different problems.