What is scraping?

Hey all,

I've been seeing a lot of talk about 'scraping' on the forums.. But what exactly is it? From my understanding, it seems as if you're scraping data from a source .. for (x) purpose. I get what you do with the data—lead gen, etc. But.. can someone give me a more elaborate explanation as to what scraping is? Are there any legal/ethical issues that can come up with scraping ? I guess I will get my answer to the very last question with a more extensive definition of scraping. Looking forward to hearing back from the community on this.

Sauce

Let's say you have a bunch of URLs (eg. 1000 soundcloud profiles) and you have a tool that's searches all those websites for email addresses. That would be scraping.
In this case, you might want to sell a music-related service and you would send out emails to all addresses found.

Basically harvesting a specific source for a specific type of data.

Ahh. I see. So since all of this information is accessible by everyone, there is no legal implications, correct? Or does that depend on the tool being used/the website being scraped? Thank you for your definition.

LostInTheSauce said:

Ahh. I see. So since all of this information is accessible by everyone, there is no legal implications, correct? Or does that depend on the tool being used/the website being scraped? Thank you for your definition.

Click to expand...

Correct, most services does not like to be scraped, but it is impossible to stop and impossible to tell who is scraping.