[cushychicken]

Is that still practical even if you're storing the page text?

The reason I don't do that is because I have a few functions that analyze the job descriptions for relevance, but don't store the post text. I mostly did that to save space - I'm just aggregating links to relevant roles, not hosting job posts.

I figured saving ~1000 job descriptions would take up a needlessly large chunk of space, but truth be told I never did the math to check.

Edit: I understand scrapy does something similar to what you're describing; have considered using that as my scraper frontend but haven't gotten around to doing the work for it yet.

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah, sure. The text itself is usually at most a few hundred Kb, and HTML compresses extremely well. Like it's pretty slow to unpack and replay the documents, but it's still a lot faster than downloading them again.

[MrMetlHed]

And it's friendlier to the server you're getting the data from.

As a journalist, I have to scrape government sites now and then for datasets they won't hand over via FOIA requests ("It's on our site, that's the bare minimum to comply with the law so we're not going to give you the actual database we store this information in.") They're notoriously slow and often will block any type of systematic scraping. Better to get whatever you can and save it, then run your parsing and analysis on that instead of hoping you can get it from the website again.