What is news scraping

News scraping is the process of collecting news articles from websites for the purpose of creating a dataset or for other purposes such as data analysis or reporting. This is typically done using specialized software or scripts that are designed to extract the relevant information from the website and store it in a structured format, such as a database or spreadsheet. This can be useful for researchers, journalists, and others who need large amounts of news data for their work.

Is news scraping legal?

The legality of news scraping depends on a number of factors, including how the information is being used and whether the website from which the information is being collected has explicitly prohibited scraping. In general, scraping a website for personal or research purposes is likely to be legal, but scraping a website for commercial purposes without the permission of the website owner is less likely to be legal. It’s always best to check the terms of service for the website in question and consult with a lawyer if you have any doubts about the legality of your scraping activities. Currents API only provides the data and are not responsible for the final use.

Challenges of news scraping

There are a number of challenges associated with news scraping, including:

  • Websites often have different structures and formatting, which can make it difficult to extract information in a consistent and reliable way.

  • Some websites may use technologies such as JavaScript to dynamically generate content, which can make it difficult or impossible to scrape the information using traditional methods.

  • Websites may have measures in place to prevent scraping, such as captchas or rate limiting, which can make it difficult to collect large amounts of data in a short period of time.

  • Scraping can put a strain on a website’s servers, which can lead to performance issues or even cause the website to go down. This can be a problem for both the website owner and the person doing the scraping.

  • Legal issues can also arise if the scraping is done without the permission of the website owner, or if the information is used in a way that infringes on the rights of the website or its users.

Overall, news scraping can be a complex and challenging task, and it’s important to approach it with care and consideration.

Currently, news website allows by large search engines to crawl while blocking others outside the wall garden. As so we hope to level the playing field by doing our own data acquisition pipeline.