91–100 of 114 posts
Sure, it can be! Also, as some people have already pointed out, this is often a gray area where people go beyond violating ToS. Some good examples are privacy violations (scraping personal data), credentials stuffing etc. Recently, there is a boom of "anti-bot" services. These are essentially SaaS businesses that "protect" websites from being scraped by automated software. As you onboard the first customer who wants…
Google, a trillion dollar company, is essentially the world's largest web scraper. So...yes! You'll almost certainly find a way to monetize that. Monopolies, lobbying and protectionism got in the way of keeping the web truly machine readable. There's tremendous value in restoring some of it.
> Monopolies, lobbying and protectionism got in the way of keeping the web truly machine readable. Exactly and that ship has long since sailed. The good ship Web 3.0 (semantic web) launched in ‘99 and was a ghost ship until recently when it was boarded by crypto pirates now flying the web 3.0 flag. > There's tremendous value in restoring some of it. To this comment and OP, my startup is using web scraping to pre-popu…
The Semantic Web would have given much better search among other benefits.
Sure, it can be! Also, as some people have already pointed out, this is often a gray area where people go beyond violating ToS. Some good examples are privacy violations (scraping personal data), credentials stuffing etc. Recently, there is a boom of "anti-bot" services. These are essentially SaaS businesses that "protect" websites from being scraped by automated software. As you onboard the first customer who wants…
Wasn't there a ruling that web scraping was legal now?
Are you falling in love with the code? I think you'll have a lot more luck finding 2-3 initial customers before you try to raise money. It's always easier to explain what your product does, and who the target market is, in terms of actual customers; instead of hypotheticals. Remember, the goal is to build a business. If you fall in love with the code, it's too easy to build something you enjoy working on, but has lim…
Am I falling in love with the code? I'd say we're on the 2nd date .... I may even get lucky. But it's enough to make me hang up on recruiters (respectfully). Good point though. Bootstrapping is a viable option too, but fundraising has certain no non-financial benefits that can be appealing.
It's very hard to fundraise without some kind of market validation.
But I think there is a huge opportunity in scraping data and then doing something interesting with it. Google is the most obvious example of this type of company. But, for example, certain CRM companies are more about data scraping than working with user-provided data.
Please consider helping us support the EFF actions. Outside the obvious vested interests of our business, I truly believe scraping the web is a force of good and progress. And the EFF work in ensuring web scraping stays a legal practice in the Unite States has been outstanding. [1]
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/eff-ninth-circuit-rece...
(I was CTO of hiQ (technically still am I think))
contact me if you want to chat about scraping danbmil99 at gmail
Of course. See Yodlee and Plaid.
I am the CEO of https://serpapi.com . Please consider helping us support the EFF actions. Outside the obvious vested interests of our business, I truly believe scraping the web is a force of good and progress. And the EFF work in ensuring web scraping stays a legal practice in the Unite States has been outstanding. [1] [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/eff-ninth-circuit-rece...