How is web crawling different from web scraping?

Answer

Web crawling focuses on discovering and retrieving pages, while web scraping extracts specific data from those pages. Crawling answers “what pages exist,” and scraping answers “what information is on those pages.” In practice, you often crawl first to build the URL list, then scrape the fields you care about. Crawling deals with link discovery, deduplication, and scheduling. Scraping deals with page parsing, selectors, and data validation. Both are usually combined in a full data pipeline.