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Mechanical Turk doesn't always produce great results for something like web scraping. It really depends on the particular website and data that is being scraped
by rpedela 12y ago
Mechanical Turk doesn't always produce great results for something like web scraping. It really depends on the particular website and data that is being scraped. Usually there is also significant setup involved so that MTurk produces good results regardless of the task. If Rabbits really can do web scraping cheap, fast, and well then it might be worth the money.
- notastartup 12y agoMechanical Turk gets expensive fast, and isn't very accurate, usually with any type of service, there's an overhead. What this seems like is a quick way to get grunt work done. I can see how web scraping can fit nicely. However, some student with a lot of free time won't value their time as much so they will write a scraper but someone like a manager with a busy engineering team can save a lot of time outsourcing tasks like this. Another solution is to use web scraping tool like https://scrape.it https://scrape.it to scrape a website even for complicated AJAX websites. After you know how to use it, it's way faster than writing a scraper from scratch. Disclaimer: I wrote scrape.it
- icinnamon 12y agoIf you need to scrape, check out Kimono... https://www.kimonolabs.com/ https://www.kimonolabs.com/
- prawn 12y agoHave to go and sign up, work out how the job needs to be described, deal with interface peculiarities, etc. Similar to Magic. Might sound easy to order food online, but it's more time-consuming than just asking someone to do it.