Why web scraping is vital to democracy

The fruits of web scraping — using code to harvest data and information from websites — are all around us. People build scrapers that can find every Applebee’s on the planet or collect congressional legislation and votes or track fancy watches for sale on fan websites. Businesses use scrapers to manage their online retail inventory and monitor competitors’ prices. Lots of well-known sites use scrapers to do things like track airline ticket prices and job listings. Google is essentially a giant, crawling web scraper. Scrapers are also the tools of watchdogs and journalists, which is why The Markup filed an…

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