Looking for an example of when a screen scraper might prove useful

Question

A screen scraper seems like a useful tool - you can go to another user's site and steal your data - how wonderful!

But it’s hard for me to help.

Most of the application data is quite specific to this application, even on the Internet. For example, let's say I clear all questions and answers from StackOverflow or all results from Google (provided that this was possible). I still have data that is not very useful if I do not have either a competing question, and (in which case the stolen data will be immediately obvious) or a competing search engine (in this case, if I do not have my own algorithm, my data will be pretty fast become obsolete).

So my question is: under what circumstances can data from one application be useful for any external application? I am looking for a practical example to illustrate the point.

Answer 1

A good example is StackOverflow - there is no need to clear the data as they released it under the CC license. Already the community brings down statistics and creates interesting graphics.

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