Fetch Technologies Blog

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We at Fetch have spent the last decade researching and building Web data extraction technology. Heading up Technology and Operations at Fetch, I wanted to share my perspective on why I think our technology will become a fundamental building block for the Web ecosystem in the next decade.

Over its evolution from a simple hypertext medium to a highly interactive, social experience deeply embedded in our culture and commerce, the Web has always had a clear target audience – humans. Most recent innovation on the Web can be traced to making information easier to find, navigate and easier for us to use. This, however, leaves a huge opportunity unfulfilled – the opportunity for computers to easily gather information from the Web and do what computers do best – tireless processing and applying sophisticated analysis to large amounts of data to glean novel insights.

We can clearly see efforts toward achieving this goal – many Web companies offer APIs into the services they expose on the Web, and efforts to semantically mark up Web pages are one of the goals of Semantic Web purveyors. And there is a ready market for this – witness the explosion of innovative “mash ups” and startups transcoding the desktop Web experience onto mobile devices via “apps.”

This will, however, only get us so far. Information on the Internet is so vast, so ever-changing and growing so rapidly that trying to semantically mark up Web data for computer consumption, or expecting to find neat APIs exposing the data you want in just the way you want is just not reasonable, nor will that approach scale. Yet enabling the Web to be machine-readable, or more precisely, allowing computers to easily obtain live Web data for downstream (or “up the stack”) innovation will be key to enabling breakthrough services, as virtually all human knowledge will eventually be available live on the Web.

Note that this is very different from search engines – while they have access to the entire Web, indexed by keywords, their goal is to allow humans to find the particular piece of information that they are looking for – presented in a way that makes sense for humans (and enabling advertising revenue along the way).

Fetch, along with our competitors, offers a solution to this: technology to augment the Web’s presentation and navigation layer (which is geared towards us humans) by taking the very same human-readable presentation of Web data and turning it into a live data feed that presents the key data that is required for downstream processing, formatted and normalized for machine consumption.

Let’s accelerate progress and let humans do what they’re best at – focusing on creating innovative Internet applications, rather than the tedious tasks of creating and maintaining access to Web data via APIs, semantically marking up Web pages, or creating and maintaining brittle custom-coded “Web scrapers.” Let’s leave that leg work up to machines by layering a level of machine intelligence onto the same substrate that we are using for human consumption to enable access to Web data in a fully automated way. I can’t wait to see the innovation in Internet experiences that this will enable!