Why they keep the data or no easy data mining

2 pointsisnoteasy1 comment

Reading norvig library in HN or google.groups, also HN, you notice that data is not easy available. I should like to have a text file description of what i see in a web page, but I think that they prefer to keep the data not easily available. So wait another century for the semantic web or some big enterprise to get all the data, that is the winner takes it all.

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I've always thought the same thing. People always talk about how we'll have digital assistants to do research for us, schedule oil changes, doctors appointments, etc.

But don't ask your digital assistant to get a new email address for you, that's protected by a captcha. Don't ask your digital assistant to make an oil change appointment for you, it's probably against the TOS of the Jiffy Lube website.

People have to start thinking differently about how the web works before we can automate a lot of this stuff. And obviously for 99.9% of the cases you don't want to be able to automate getting a new email address. So I really don't have the answers as to how to fix things.

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