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by jjeaff 1690 days ago
At least google's scraping does result in your website being discoverable by users. So you get something out of it. That's not to say that sometimes Google is missing or stealing data they scrape. But at least there is some benefit. Many other scrapers are merely taking the data to compete.
1 comments

I strongly feel that if a human can get to it manually, we have to accept that either it will be botted or humans will be paid to do it by hand (They call these people "analysts" or "market researchers").

I might argue that what google actually uses their scraped data for is their search engine - which is private. They simply allow us access to specially crafted queries, which they can and do manipulate (for many reasons, some good some bad).

The only thing I'd say meets that definition would be like Common Crawl.