Difference web crawling and web scraping

Question

I am unable to actually figure out the difference between web crawling and web scraping .

If I am scraping data from the FedEx website using every tracking number is it web scraping or web crawling?

Please give a good short example with the difference.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Short answer : Web crawling just indexes the information using bots, where as Web scraping aka web data extraction is an automated software technique of extracting information from web.

Elaborated answer :

Web crawling aka Indexing, is used to index the information on the page using bots also known as crawlers. Web Crawlers are basically used by major search engines like google, bing, yahoo, in other terms Google, Bing are one of the major web crawlers. Here we get generic information, where as scraping we get specific information.

Web scraping aka Web Data Extraction, is an automated way of extracting the information/content using bots aka scrapers. Here the information can be used to replicate in some other website or can be used to do data analysis.
[Information in this context means all varieties of content including images, text, sensible information like contact details, price etc.]