Comment on Chad scraper

• oatscoop@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  When the data is on multiple sites or sources.

  API licenses can be expensive, and some sources might not even have an API.

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  • madcaesar@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I get the concept but a concrete example. What company could possibly want to pay for scraping a site?

    Some dude as a hobby I get it, but what, like Amazon will pay some guy to scrape competition prices or something?

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    • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Maybe you’ve got a small company involved in toy buying and reselling, and they want to scrape toy postings from ebay etc. so that they can scroll through a database of different postings and sort it by price or estimated profit or whatever.

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    • oatscoop@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I can’t imagine data scraping is something companies will quickly admit to, considering the legal issues involved. It was also the norm for a long time – APIs for accessing user generated data is a relatively new thing.

      As for a concrete example: companies using chatGPT. A lot of useful data comes from scraping sites that don’t offer an API.

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