Glossary

Web Scraping & API Glossary

Comprehensive glossary of web scraping, crawling, and API terms. Learn the essential concepts and terminology used in web data extraction.

How is web crawling different from web scraping?

Webcrawling

Answer Web crawling focuses on discovering and retrieving pages, while web scraping extracts specific data from those pa...

How often should you crawl a site?

Webcrawling

Answer Match crawl frequency to how often content changes and how quickly you need updates. High‑change sites may need m...

How do you avoid getting blocked when crawling?

Webcrawling

Answer To avoid getting blocked, crawl politely and predictably. Respect robots.txt, use reasonable rate limits, and ide...

How do you crawl JavaScript-heavy sites?

Webcrawling

Answer To crawl JavaScript‑heavy sites, use a headless browser to render pages before extracting content. Wait for criti...

Is web crawling legal?

Webcrawling

Answer Web crawling legality depends on the website, the data you collect, and the laws in your jurisdiction. Many sites...

What are common web crawling tools?

Webcrawling

Answer Common web crawling tools include Scrapy, Apache Nutch, Playwright, Puppeteer, and managed crawler platforms. Scr...

What data does a web crawler collect?

Webcrawling

Answer Common crawler data includes URLs, status codes, headers, page content, metadata, links, and timestamps. Many sys...

What is crawl budget?

Webcrawling

Answer Crawl budget is the number of pages a crawler can fetch within time and resource constraints. It is limited by yo...

What is robots.txt?

Webcrawling

Answer robots.txt is a file at a site root that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not access. It uses a simple ...

What is web crawling?

Webcrawling

Answer Web crawling is the automated process of discovering and fetching web pages by following links so you can build a...