Scraping LinkedIn for info is really useful.
It’s also really difficult.
The company knows that they need to walk a fine balance between showing people information about Jobs, Businesses, and People, and making sure people don’t just replicate all that information themselves. They do this by focusing probably 80% of their dev team on this singular problem.
The result is that a cottage industry of digital mice, escaping the allegorical LinkedIn Cat, have sprung up, offering their services to scrape LinkedIn. The best of these is a Singaporean company called ProxyCurl.
Or should I say WAS. After being threated with a game-ending lawsuit from LinkedIn, the small band of merry scrapers decided to pack up shop, turn off the lights, and call it a day. It’s a shame, because they were very effective for our use case, and now we’re looking for another mouse.
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