• oatscoop
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    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.

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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      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?

      • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee
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        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.

      • oatscoop
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        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.