Is web scraping legal in US?
Can I be legally charged for it? What are the worst cases where I could potentially be sued for something I might have done in the name of research? The specific questions I'm wondering about are the ones listed below, and some others I can think of:
What if I use a public API, or get all the public data I need by following links (or copying tables of data from web pages)? What if I follow links to images which are hosted on a domain different than the one that hosts the article where I find those images? What if I just plain download an article as an ordinary user (eg to make a summary of it in notes or to have access to the article for when I need to refer to it while researching). Is this considered illegal if I am not able to determine whether the article is "published" or was written by an employee of the publisher. In other words: will copyright be violated when I do the whole exercise in my web browser without even clicking on a link? It's not really what happens behind the scenes, but rather the mere fact that when I view the web page in my web browser, it seems to come "ready to read" and therefore gives me the impression that I am actually reading the article if I save a copy? Can it be a violation of copyright or can it be legal even if I am not the original author of the copy?
Is it considered illegal to use someone else's photo taken with a webcam through which I could browse publicly-available (but otherwise unusable) videos and save them on my hard drive? This could, for instance, include using someone else's image of their TV to watch an otherwise-unviewable clip from said TV. Is the idea that I have made something usable so that I could use it in my own research a problem? What if I just copy a lot of text from an article, put the text into a word document on my computer, and then copy it from my word document into a new web page? What if I use a lot of text extracted from other web pages through various techniques, and then I print out these pages onto paper, sign them, and then store the papers in boxes for later reference? Will someone else ever find out about this research if I store hundreds or thousands of web pages in the name of research? Could they go after me for "stealing" them?
Can you get a job with web scraping?
For the past few years, I've kept seeing ads for web scraping jobs. It seems to come up with increasing frequency, though I don't know exactly why that is. It's possible it has something to do with the increase in data mining and sentiment analysis on the internet, and how easily available data can be monetized with a little creativity.
It's also a field that's very accessible to everyone who has a computer and wants to make a little money. But how feasible is it? Could you get hired to do web scraping for a living? A couple of days ago, I was thinking about this as I read a story on CNBC, written by Dan Primack about his experience scraping Amazon results for sale prices from their website. As a result, Dan came across a number of opportunities for people doing exactly this kind of work.
I thought I'd take the opportunity to put together an actual job posting, for those of you who might be interested in being hired to work with web scraping. It's very short and covers a variety of topics, but I hope it's useful! I'll also share a few tips that I picked up along the way that I wish I'd known a few years ago, when I first started to make money with scraping in general. Who is looking for web scraping work? You don't necessarily need any experience in web scraping, or any programming ability. You'll probably have some programming experience, but you don't need to know anything about the intricacies of web programming and server-side scripting, or about databases, and data sources in general.
Web scraping jobs are essentially a way to make extra money that isn't associated with a regular 9 to 5 job. Generally, web scrapers don't do anything too advanced, such as scraping products or creating complex reports or analysis tools. The focus is more on providing results to a client in a timely manner, which tends to require basic knowledge of the web and a little programming.
Does indeed allow web scraping?
For those who don't know the answer, I'm talking about the fact that the browser can access any page on the web. What if a site uses Flash or a different HTML/XML based rendering engine that doesn't allow "normal" JavaScript to access it's functionality. This would be a big difference, as the browsers use the JavaScript engines to process JavaScript in many cases. Does it allow this (like Google does)?
In all of those cases, it should be easy enough to figure out what you're asking for. It certainly does. For example, IE's ActiveX Browser Helper Object lets you do anything you can do from JavaScript.
I'm a software developer and I know that there is nothing stopping someone from doing anything they want in their browser from just browsing the web. If you think the web has been secure so far, you must be living under a rock or something.
Now that you mention that, it kind of changes my answer. Can the browser use the OS X Javascript engine or the Windows Javascript engine? That could be an issue. But my guess is that there will be an option to download a javascript engine from apple or microsoft for OS X or Windows respectively, like Flash or Java do for the operating system. This may help developers, but probably won't help end users.
The other side of the coin: you can only access pages that are in your browser's cache. Which means that any page that has javascript included will be inaccessible. So the internet equivalent of a CD or tape can become a bit of a pain sometimes.
But as a developer it will allow you to save your efforts in terms of development time and to test how the website will work under certain conditions.
How do I scrape my resume from indeed?
I am looking at indeed and for some reason all my information from college are listed. How do I search for all information that is not on my resume? You can use the Find My Resume feature to help you find the jobs where your resume might have been used. The steps: Log in to your Indeed.com account.
Find the job you want to search. Click the green pencil button and add notes to the job description. Click the Find My Resume button and search.
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