Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for web scraping, which means it helps users extract data from HTML and XML documents. It provides tools to navigate, search, and modify the parse tree, making it easier to retrieve specific information from web pages. This library is particularly useful for developers and data analysts who need to gather data from websites that do not offer APIs. By simplifying the process of parsing complex HTML structures, Beautiful Soup allows users to focus on data extraction without getting bogged down by the intricacies of web page formatting.