the.com/scraper
a polite robot that strip-mines the internet one HTTP request at a time
means A program that automatically extracts data from websites or documents by reading their content and pulling out the pieces it wants.
from From the verb "scrape," which goes back to Old Norse "skrapa" and Old English roots meaning to scratch or rub against a surface — the same kinship that gives us the cousin word in scratching paint off a wall. The "-er" simply names the thing that does the scraping. The literal sense (a tool for dragging across a surface, like a shoe scraper) is centuries old; the data-harvesting sense is a young, computing-age borrowing, picturing software as something that drags across a webpage and lifts off whatever sticks.
- legal gray
- Courts ruled scraping public data isn't hacking
- AI fuel
- Most large language models trained on scraped text
- arms race
- Sites deploy CAPTCHAs, scrapers deploy CAPTCHA solvers
- origin word
- Same root as removing barnacles off ships
- price wars
- Airlines scrape rivals to undercut fares hourly
web scraper bot 2024 — automated tools like selenium and beautifulsoup used by millions to extract data from websites daily
amazon price monitor — services like camelcamelcamel scrape amazon listings to track price drops for millions of products
indeed job aggregator — job boards scrape postings from company websites to consolidate listings across platforms
real estate mls crawler — zillow and redfin scrape multiple listing service data to display millions of property listings