Most people think scraping requires technical skills. But the best scraping tool you have is knowing how to ask better questions.
Scraping isn't about code. It's about knowing how to pull exactly what you need from the internet while everyone else is drowning in noise. And it starts with search operators.
As Jakob Greenfeld put it:
"The main reason why Google sucks now is that they started optimizing their ass-covering above all else. Do sites with big brand authority have the best content? Rarely. But the odds that it's complete scam or offends anyone is small. So that's what they show at the top."
Search operators cut through this. They let you skip the algorithm-approved content and go straight to what you're actually looking for. The personal blogs, the niche communities, the humans writing about things they care about.
What are Search Operators?
Search operators are the simplest form of scraping. They're commands that tell search engines exactly what you're looking for. Think of them as filters that cut through the noise.
Here's a real example from when I was working on Cherrycruit: I wanted to find companies' career pages hosted on Notion. Instead of manually visiting hundreds of websites, I searched:
site:notion.site careers
Instantly, I had a list of companies using Notion for their hiring pages. No AI agent needed. No complex scraping setup. Just a better question.
Build for your own needs
The magic happens when you start combining these operators for your specific problems.
Want to find a new startup idea?
site:reddit.com "is there an alternative to"
Want entertaining YouTube videos without getting sucked into shorts?
site:youtube.com inurl:watch Isar Aerospace
Want to search within the context of your favorite writers?
Let's say you trust Cal Newport and Derek Sivers more than random SEO-optimized articles. You can limit your search to just their content:
site:calnewport.com OR site:sive.rs time blocking
Now you're only seeing what they've written about your topic. You've created your own curated search engine.
Want to find actual humans writing, not content farms?
site:substack.com OR site:medium.com OR inurl:blog
The pattern here isn't complicated. You're just being intentional about where you look.
I wish more operators like this existed. Give me updated:last7days to find fresh content. Let me search by zip:10115 for precise locations. Or a contenttype: operator to filter for blogs, papers, personal sites.
When Better Questions Need Better Tools
This is scraping at the human scale. For most things, it's enough. It's faster, more precise, and you control exactly what you're looking for.
But when you need to scrape at machine scale, enriching thousands of data points, validating company information across hundreds of websites, extracting structured data automatically, that's when you need actual scrapers. That's the kind of problem we're solving at Compelling.
Even then, the principle stays the same: you still need to ask better questions. The technology just scales your ability to find the answers.