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I'd say most crawlers are looking to provide enriched value for content at their end use. Google is just an aggregator (the biggest by far) but other aggregators are looking to provide similar value.



So then an aggregator is different than a scraping service with respect to the value given to the rest of humanity? In that, in principle one adds value to the content creation and the other deducts through potential harmful interference with its reciprocity?


I'd say many aggregators do offer value to the rest of humanity but I imagine there are probably some exceptions and also not all scraper services offer no value it's just different value to different people.

Some scraping services make their money by offering scraping services to companies for specific information and you could argue they provide value to other businesses that way, but not to the broader "rest of humanity".

So I'm not sure it's as simple as just "aggregator" good "scraping service" bad as value provided takes on many different forms, and that's what makes this difficult.

I guess it may come down to your take on what you think of middlemen, because they are all effectively middlemen in the data economy.

Edit: I was rereading your comment, in respect directly to the value added to the content, then yes maybe it is more clear that aggregators are in principle different because they do add that value where scraping services that sell the data do not offer any enrichment to the content creator. I personally think protecting content aggregators that republish the data to create visibility or other value for the content creator to the extent that they're not worried about being sued for that is probably a worthwhile thing to happen because of the net benefit to our ability to find information/content.




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