scrapers at the next level

selling their services/data

[LifeinAsia]

So the scrapers have "evolved" beyond just scraping sites and putting up copied sites. I just came across a scraper who is selling their scraped data and even their services for scraping dozens of the largest sites, including one that belongs to a client.

Came across the advertisement on Alibaba, but it's an Indian company.

[aspdaddy]

They evolved a long time ago. There any many legitimate uses of scraping and scraping services are very common.

Many of the popular SEO tools and site analysers use it to automate manual tasks.

Many search engines use it to provide previews of pages before navigating to them

Then there's the open source crowd and scrapeforge.

Most of us have likely bought scraped data and content at some point and not even known.

[enigma1]

yes they have evolved and unless the search engines stop giving them incentives for scrapping, expect this phenomenon to grow further.

[incrediBILL]

unless the search engines stop giving them incentives for scrapping

The SEs are the biggest scrapers around and some of them, like GigaBlast or Majestic, specialize in selling their data more than being a search engine itself.

All I know is the little scrapers aren't scraping me :)

[enigma1]

there you go Bill, another way of saying it, although I was referring to the handful of the top search engines. They have ways of identifying the content author but they prefer to do otherwise.