APIs Vs Web Scrapers

APIs Vs Web Scrapers
web-scraping-memes, apis-memes, data-extraction-memes, backend-memes, pirates-memes | ProgrammerHumor.io

The elegant waitstaff vs. the ragtag pirates perfectly captures the data access divide. APIs are like fancy servers bringing you data on a silver platter with proper documentation and rate limits. Meanwhile, web scrapers are the digital pirates who'll rip the data straight from the HTML's cold, dead hands when no API exists.

After 15 years in the trenches, I've written both. The API is what you show the client. The scraper is what you build at 2 AM when the client's competitor suddenly becomes "very interesting" to them.

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