An Implementation of Web Scraping IMDB Website

Web scraping is a powerful technique for extracting data from websites, and it has numerous applications in fields such as data science, market research, and business intelligence. In this article, web scraping is applied to extract data from IMDb (Internet Movie Database), the popular online database of movies, TV shows, and other entertainment content. The goal of this system is to collect a comprehensive dataset of movies and TV shows from IMDb website, along with their associated metadata such as ratings, genres, cast and crew and plot summaries. This automates the data collection process, creates charts/visualisation, displays the distribution of movie ratings, the most popular genres, the top-rated actors, or the most profitable movies. Python and the Beautiful Soup library files are used to extract the data, and then store it in a structured format and also into a MYSQL server database. Extracted ratings are analysed with different parameters of movies. It is found that this system followed a robust technique with DOM parsing, Tree traversal algorithms, CSS selectors, Xpath expressions and finite automata. Results are analysed with respect to extraction of required parameters.