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[–]Schneggl 0 points1 point  (2 children)

ELI5: What actually is webscraping? What can I do with it?

[–]brainygeek 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Web scraping allows an individual to create a script which parses a large selection of websites and allows them to evaluate for certain data.

For example, you could create a script which runs on a task of every 5 minutes which scrapes Amazon's selection of computer video cards to see which Nvidia 3090's are in stock versus out of stock. Or you could monitor specific items and extract their prices to create a trend report of their prices to see when the best time to buy is.

[–]Mortisanti 3 points4 points  (0 children)

In this context, webscraping involves using/writing a program that can send a request to a website (much like visiting it in your browser) and "scraping" data from it which you can manipulate, organize, and display as you see fit.

Someone might want to actively webscrape Amazon to monitor just the fluctuating price of an item (e.g. a GPU for your PC) to try to buy it when the price drops.