• madcaesar@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    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?

    • oatscoop
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      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.

    • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      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.