Top Web Scraping Projects to Sharpen Your Skills and Build Your Web Scraping Portfolio

Web scrapers automate the collection of useful information from third-party websites. Through this process, you request a specific web page, read the HTML code, and break down the code to gather data. In this article, we will cover the skills needed to be proficient at web scraping, as well as web scraping projects ideas of all difficulty levels.

5 Skills That Web Scraping Projects Can Help You Practice

Web scraping has seen an increase in popularity during the last few years. Companies are searching for web scraping professionals to help them collect data from the internet. Web scraping is closely related to several programming and web development languages, including Python, HTML, and Javascript. 

In addition to knowing these languages, web scrapers are expected to possess other technical skills and knowledge. Below, we’ve listed the five most important skills web scrapers can learn and practice through projects.

• Selenium WebDriver. This WebDriver is an automation tool that uses open-source APIs. A WebDriver circulates commands across applications and analyzes websites and apps for relevant data. It is used to run automated tests for websites and applications within browsers. Selenium WebDriver runs cross-browser tests and is updated regularly. 
• Python. Python allows you to perform a wide range of operations, including web development, task automation, and data analysis. It’s an all-in-one software tool that can handle the majority of web crawling-related tasks. The Beautiful Soup framework, based on Python, makes web scraping easier by pulling data from HTML and XML files.
• HTML, CSS, Javascript. CSS and Javascript are important for gathering data inside the HTML code, so knowing how to use these languages is important.
• Data cleaning. Data cleaning refers to the process of filtering or cleansing the data you’ve collected during web scraping. Data cleaning involves looking for incomplete, false, or unreliable parts of data and updating or deleting it.
• Working with Robots.txt file. Robot.txt is a text file that is scanned by search engine crawl bots, also known as spiders. You can control what pages of a website the bots can crawl for data through the Robots.txt file.

Best Web Scraping Project Ideas for Beginners 

Below we’ve listed some beginner project ideas. These projects will help you to build your knowledge of foundational web scraping skills. They cover different industries so you can choose one that matches your interests.

Scrape a Subreddit

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

Your web scraping skills will be put to the test in Reddit’s thriving communities. You can see what Reddit users are saying about a particular topic on subreddits and how often they discuss it. The subreddit r/webdev is a great place to scrape information for web development professionals and enthusiasts. 

Subreddits can be scraped for specific topics, like finding jobs. This is a beginner-friendly project. You should start with this technique if you haven’t used web scraping before. Changing the subreddit size will alter the difficulty level of this project.

Perform Consumer Research

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

Using social media sites and customer review websites, you can gather data for consumer research. It is also possible to scrape blogs that discuss a company’s products. These blogs are excellent sources of information. By completing this project, you will become more knowledgeable in data science and sentiment analysis. Start by researching a brand or topic online.

Analyze Competitors

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

Data scientists and analysts collect data to find out what competitors are doing and how to improve their business. First, choose an industry that interests you, pick a brand or company in this industry, and analyze their competitors. A smaller brand is a good choice for a beginner since it has fewer competitors than larger ones. 

You should research the brand’s competitors. Find out what their competitors sell and how their audience is targeted by scraping the web. You can search for a brand’s product categories to find competitors. 

This kind of web scraping can be extremely beneficial to new and growing companies. The number of competitors you wish to analyze can be increased to make the project more challenging. 

Use Web Scraping for SEO

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves modifying a website according to search engine preferences. The demand for effective SEO is increasing as the number of internet users steadily rises. SEO impacts the ranking of a website when a person searches for a particular keyword. 

You can build a tool that scrapes the rankings for different keywords on selected websites. Using this tool, it is possible to extract the words these companies use to describe themselves. By using this technique, you can create and sort a list of websites based on specific keywords. This list can help marketing teams use these keywords to boost the website’s ranking. 

This is a simple example of web scraping used in SEO. You can take it a step further by creating a tool similar to this that can also obtain meta-data from these web pages. Among other elements, the title of the webpage is included. You will also learn the different ways web scraping can be used for search engine optimization.

Scrape Data of Sports Teams

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

If you scrape the websites of sports teams and organizations related to these sports, you can find relevant archives of useful information. For example, ESPN’s cricket statistics database is ideal for cricket fans. 

When you scrape this data, you will have all the team-related information you need. This project can be more difficult if you add more teams to your analysis. This is also a great project for beginners. It is an interesting way to learn about web scraping and its applications.

Best Intermediate Web Scraping Project Ideas 

Web scraping is a fascinating part of data science. There are numerous applications for web scraping tools on the internet. Here are a few intermediate web scraping project ideas that you can try if you are familiar with the key elements of this subject.

Get Financial Data

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

A great deal of data is used and created in the finance sector. Data on a company’s financial performance and reliability is useful to investors in many ways. This data also helps a company analyze its financial status. This project is ideal for those interested in finance.

This project can be approached in multiple ways. You can scrape the web to find the stock price performance of a company’s stock in a specific period along with news articles about the company during that period. Data like this can help investors understand how different factors affect the stock price of a company. 

A company’s financial health depends on its financial statistics. A company’s stakeholders can use these reports to determine how well or how poorly their business is doing. In this project, you will use your skills to analyze financial data. 

Scrape a Job Portal

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

For this project, you will build a tool that will scrape a job portal and verify if a job meets the requirements specified in the job posting. Using a job portal, you can examine data analyst jobs and their requirements to determine the most popular attributes for hiring a professional in this field. 

Online Game Review Analysis

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python

The gaming industry is continuously growing. Companies hire analysts to keep track of customer reviews and collect data to better understand how to increase and maintain interest and customer satisfaction. The STEAM game store data can be used for web scraping projects. 

Users have reviewed more than four million games and the store itself hosts about 10,000 games. To extract the metadata of the games the website hosts, you can use the product listings page. Python’s Scrapy is a good tool to use for this project. The CrawlSpider from Scrapy lets you control how the game store page is crawled.

Hotel Pricing Analytics

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML

Typically the most expensive part of a vacation is paying for a place to stay, like a hotel. Keeping track of hotel prices can help you to save on this expense. However, manually tracking these prices is time-consuming. 

Travelers can book hotels on Booking.com in various cities around the world. By scraping data from this site, you can collect information about hotels such as their name, types of rooms, locations, and ratings and train a model that uses machine learning algorithms to learn the features of the hotels and predict their prices. 

In this project, the Python requests library will be a helpful tool for scraping the HTML content from the web page. You can use SelectorLib to extract the YAML files that are created when you download the HTML content.

IMDb Scraper

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML

The international movie database (IMDb) has lots of data about numerous movies, TV shows, and videos. IMDb users submit ratings and write comments and reviews on IMDb’s web pages. There is a lot of data to be processed here which can make this project challenging. Alternatively, you can scrape IMDb and compare the data to another movie database website. 

Advanced Web Scraping Project Ideas

Below are some advanced projects for practicing web scraping skills. These projects will help you to prepare for a career in web scraping.

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News Aggregation 

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with everything happening around the world. There are many news channels to choose from, and each channel has its own strengths and weaknesses. For this project, you can use the Web Content Extractor. A free 14-day trial version of Web Content Extractor is available.

You can customize a global news feed that is compiled from around the world using web scrapers to automate the process. To gather news, you can choose websites you are interested in and scrape their content. Next, a machine learning natural language processing-based text summary and keyword analysis would be used to submit relevant news. 

House Price Prediction

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

Many working professionals dream of owning a home. However, the real estate market can be overwhelming and stressful. Prices are constantly changing and are often over budget for most individuals. 

The Portuguese real estate website Casa SAPO, which features listings of available properties, can be a case study. It is a real estate website that shows houses for sale. You can use Python’s Beautiful Soup and Requests libraries to complete this project.

Word Frequency Distribution for Novels

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

Natural Language Processing (NLP), a component of artificial intelligence, aims to train computers to understand human language. There are many exciting applications for AI, such as sentiment analysis and text summarization. 

This project will combine NLP methods with web scraping techniques. Textual data from free online novels can be scraped and used to plot interesting statistics like word frequency distribution, which helps determine which words an author frequently uses. Project Gutenberg has many free ebooks you can use for this project. Python’s Beautiful Soup is used to scrape web content for this project. 

Political Data Analytics

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

Facebook and Twitter are a way for people to express opinions. Several movements have gained worldwide recognition through social media websites. There has been a significant shift in political parties’ understanding of social media influence and they are now more inclined to use social media data to assess a party’s influence.

You can scrape public posts from social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to determine the generic sentiment of a country’s citizens towards a specific political party for this project. You can implement this project in R and use its Facebook package to scrape Facebook’s API data.

Equity Research Analysis

• Web Scraping Skills Practiced: Python, HTML, CSS

An equity research analyst analyzes and comprehends a company’s financial statements of the past few years, including its balance sheet, profit and loss statement, and cash flow statement. Portfolio managers can use this information to ensure that their investments are in companies they are interested in.

The financial statements from most companies are posted on the Investor Relations section of their website. To understand how Walt Disney’s finances are evolving, you can visit the Investor Relations website and scrape the PDFs provided there. Python’s Beautiful Soup is recommended for this project. You will also need PyPDF2, which contains the PdfFileReader class to extract the content from PDFs.

Web Scraping Tools

Manually scraping the web is possible, but it is extremely time-consuming. To speed up the process, you can use web scraping tools that are automated and more efficient. Below you’ll find the top web scraping tools for web crawling.

• ParseHub. A web scraper can be built using web scrapers without writing lines of code. Selecting the relevant data is the only thing required. Anyone interested in playing with data can use ParseHub. Analysts, scientists, and journalists benefit from it.
• Scrapy. Python developers use Scrapy to build scalable crawlers for the web. The framework provides all the functions necessary to build a complete web crawler, such as proxy middleware and querying requests.
• OctoParse. The target audience for OctoParse is similar to that of ParseHub. It caters to people who want to scrape data without having to write code while still having control over the entire process using their intuitive user interface.
• Scraper API. Scraper API is a tool for web scrapers built by designers. By simply making a simple API call, raw HTML from any website can be obtained. It handles browsers, proxies, and CAPTCHAs.
• Mozenda. Mozenda is designed for enterprises looking for a cloud-based, self-service web scraping platform. Mozenda boasts enterprise customers across the globe after scraping over seven billion pages.

Next Steps: Start Organizing Your Web Scraping Portfolio

After you’ve created several web scraping projects you can compile them in a professional portfolio. A well-written and organized portfolio can increase the chances of you getting hired as a web scraping specialist. Here are a couple of tips to make your web scraping portfolio more presentable.

Building Your Own Web Scraping Portfolio

As we’ve discussed above, there are countless web scraping projects you can undertake. Most industries are employing web scrapers for data collection purposes. After you’ve completed a couple of web scraping projects or worked as a web scraper, you can compile them in a professional portfolio. 

A portfolio can be several pages long. Creating a web scraping portfolio can showcase your skills to employers. Some professionals choose to create a portfolio website where they can post and update their work history and qualifications as needed.

Proper Layout

If you want your portfolio to be effective in delivering information about your work experience and skills, you must separate it into sections. The work history and your personal qualifications should be separated into sections.

Dividing your web scraping portfolio into sections is a great way to make it appear more visually appealing and accessible. The hiring manager will find it much easier to navigate your web scraper portfolio if you organize the content. 

What to Include in a Web Scraping Portfolio

Your web scraping portfolio can include a variety of things. Viewers can see all of your qualifications, skills, and work experience across the many sections of the portfolio. Use this as an opportunity to list your technical skills in great detail. Web scraping is about the masterful use of automation programs, Python, HTML, Javascript, and SEO. 

The work history section should contain explanations of your previous projects. If you were working for a firm or company as a professional web scraper, you could write about what your job duties involved. 

Web Scraping Projects FAQ