A scraper site is a website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. No part of a scraper site is original. A search engine is not a scraper site: sites such as Yahoo and Google gather content from other websites and index it so that the index can be searched with keywords. Search engines then display snippets of the original site content in response to a user's search. In the last few years, and due to the advent of the Google Adsense web advertising program, scraper sites have proliferated at an amazing rate for spamming search engines.

When it comes to online business, getting a high page rank is very important. This is because this will show your site’s popularity. However, if you do not have the proper content in your site, then a high page rank might just be a dream for you. It is best if you will have web content with the proper keywords that would draw search engines to your site. The more fresh and creative and keyword-strategic your web content is, the more chances you have on getting a higher page rank.

Search engines are a big help, but they can do only part of the work, and they are hard-pressed to keep up with daily changes. For all the power of Google and its kin, all that search engines can do is locate information and point to it. They go only two or three levels deep into a Web site to find information and then return URLs. Many efforts are now being put into place by webmasters in order to prevent this form of theft and vandalism.

It has therefore become a kind of way to parse the HTML text of web pages. The web scraping program is designed to process the text data that is of interest to the human reader, while identifying and removing any unwanted data, images, and formatting for the web design.Though web scraping is often done for ethical reasons, it is frequently performed in order to swipe the data of "value" from another person or organization's website in order to apply it to someone else's - or to sabotage the original text altogether.

Proxy Data Scraping technology solves the problem by using proxy IP addresses. Every time your data scraping program executes an extraction from a website, the website thinks it is coming from a different IP address. To the website owner, proxy data scraping simply looks like a short period of increased traffic from all around the world. They have very limited and tedious ways of blocking such a script but more importantly -- most of the time, they simply won't know they are being scraped.

The term "screen-scraping" comes from the old mainframe terminal days where people worked on computers with green and black screens containing only text. Screen-scraping was used to extract characters from the screens so that they could be analyzed. Fast-forwarding to the web world of today, screen-scraping now most commonly refers to extracting information from web sites. That is, computer programs can "crawl" or "spider" through web sites, pulling out data.