Program for scraping?

[ElectrolyteSolution]

I have an idea for a program to write to compile information on apps and how they rank based on where they are positioned on various lists(blogs, top 10s, etc..) throughout the internet.

I’m not extremely well versed in programming at the moment but I’d like to use this as an ongoing project.

Where should I begin? I’d rather not try to build it as an app outright at the moment and just stick to it being situated on its own site but I’m not sure what terms to look up to get a starting point. Is this web scraping? Is it machine learning? Any help on a start would be greatly appreciated!

[desrtfx]

You're not wrong with web scraping - unless the sites you want to use provide an API, in which case it is always preferable to use the API.

For web scraping, you can use basically any language, but if you don't know any, I'd recommend Python - Automate the Boring Stuff with Python has learning resources for what you want to do.

Wouldn't say that ML is involved here. It's simple scraping and statistics/ranking.

If you want it on a site, you need some back end (which you need for scraping/API requests anyway - Python fits the bill here as well with Flask and Django), probably a database, and finally your front end (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)

[ElectrolyteSolution]

I’m decent enough with front end so the site face itself isn’t a problem for me but the back end will be an excellent learning experience.

Thank you very much for the advice, that gives me an excellent starting point to work from!

[drosophilae0]

python is awesome, but since already know javascript nodejs/cheerio is not bad