## **Early Web Automation (Early 2000s)** - **Web scraping …

bridget ·

## **Early Web Automation (Early 2000s)**
- **Web scraping bots** for price comparison and automated purchasing existed since the early 2000s
- **"Bidder's Edge"** - one of the first e-commerce scraping bots launched in the early 2000s to aggregate auction site pricing
- **APIs and scripts** could automate online purchases through programmatic interfaces