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Is it common for developers in the eCommerce space to use scrapers as a means to aggressively push automated price-match algorithms? I've been asked to do this a number of times, was just curious as to how prevalent it is.


Yes, everybody scrapes the prices of the others.


With stuff like Facebook opengraph (e.g. og:price) and other meta tags meant to help search engines and social networks get this sort of data to display inline, do you think it's inevitable that complex scraping will no longer be needed in a practical sense since everyone will be inadvertently optimizing their markup in a way that you could write a really simple parser to grab the data?


Given that FB's bot identifies itself, no, eventually some websites will present og: markup only to FB's bot.


Couldn't you just spoof the user agent though? Or is there some other mechanism that you can use to verify the bot is Facebook's?


IP address.


Most companies will use resources not in their datacenter and not identifiable. Executives know it's sketchy, but they do it anyway.




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