What are the names of all the people wearing purple shirts in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom right now? Don’t worry, I understand how ridiculous that question sounds. Even for anyone in the Magic Kingdom, the task is enormous. You would have to canvas the entire park for anyone wearing a purple shirt. Then, for each one, you have to ask their name and document it. And no matter how fast you get at it, by the time you are done, there is surely a new influx of purple-shirt-wearing Disney fans walking through the gates.
I bring up this as an analogy to web data. There is such an incomprehensible amount of it, finding the information you need is a mammoth task. Even trying to be really specific leaves you with an impossible job. In the example above, I mention Magic Kingdom only. Even specifying that park apart from the others is still ridiculous. And like manually searching for those people, manually searching for that data is long, hard work with little reward. You can spend hours looking up home prices in Mobile, Alabama and still have hardly any idea what the average is. However, there is help. You can use scraping ...
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