What is web scraping?

Mechanically it is fetch, parse, extract. The complication is whether the data exists in the HTML the server sends or is added afterwards by JavaScript in the browser, because the second case needs a real browser engine and is far slower and heavier. It is always worth checking for a documented API or a data feed first — many sites have one, and using it is faster, more stable and uncontroversial.

Scrapers are brittle by nature: they depend on markup nobody promised to keep stable, so a redesign breaks them silently and you get empty results rather than an error. Storing the raw response alongside the extracted fields means you can re-parse historical data after a fix instead of losing it. Rate limiting yourself is both courtesy and self-interest, since aggressive scraping is what gets an address blocked.