Web scraping also called web data extraction, is the process of extracting or scraping data from websites.
With web scraping, you can obtain the data that were not readily available online. You can
- Scrape movie rating data to create movie recommendation engines.
- Scrape text data from Wikipedia and other sources for making NLP-based systems or training deep learning models for tasks like topic recognition from the given text.
- Scrape data from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for performing tasks Sentiment analysis, opinion mining, etc.
- Scrape user reviews and feedbacks from e-commerce sites like Amazon, Flipkart, etc.
There are browser extensions that help you to do web scraping, but here we will focus on the web scraping using R.