In an earlier post, I pointed out some price discrepancies between the electronic parts industry and the consumer electronics industry (http://news.ycombinator.

In an earlier post, I pointed out some price discrepancies between the electronic parts industry and the consumer electronics industry (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=168796 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=168796). This is the evidence that I'm basing my assertion on. Incidentally, this comparison was not possible before Octopart. There is no difference between what Octopart is doing and what Google is doing. Both companies crawl the web and mine their data sets for useful information. Typically, the word "scraping" is used to imply mal intent but I don't think it has a good technical definition.