Chad scraper

dramaticcat@sh.itjust.works to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1014 points –
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By getting someone to hire you to do it.

No I mean more what is the use case where it would be worth scrapping on a massive scale?

When the data is on multiple sites or sources.

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

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?

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.

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.