Stumbling upon useful information on the web (whether intentional or not) is a critical part of all our daily workflow. What you choose to do with those resources and how you later choose to leverage them directly correlates with the efficiency of your process.
Some of us add helpful sites to our Bookmarks, save webpage snippets to our Pocket or Evernote, &/or frequently exercise our copy/paste fingers. Others, well, others extract the data and create a searchable database of its intel…
When I first learned of web scraping/data mining, my internal “Hacker Alert!” alarm went off. I quickly learned, however, that (ethically) scraping a web page’s data is far from hacking – in fact, coding knowledge isn’t even required!