Mechanical Turk gets expensive fast, and isn't very accurate, usually with any type of service, there's an overhead.
What this seems like is a quick way to get grunt work done. I can see how web scraping can fit nicely. However, some student with a lot of free time won't value their time as much so they will write a scraper but someone like a manager with a busy engineering team can save a lot of time outsourcing tasks like this.
Another solution is to use web scraping tool like https://scrape.it to scrape a website even for complicated AJAX websites. After you know how to use it, it's way faster than writing a scraper from scratch.
What this seems like is a quick way to get grunt work done. I can see how web scraping can fit nicely. However, some student with a lot of free time won't value their time as much so they will write a scraper but someone like a manager with a busy engineering team can save a lot of time outsourcing tasks like this.
Another solution is to use web scraping tool like https://scrape.it to scrape a website even for complicated AJAX websites. After you know how to use it, it's way faster than writing a scraper from scratch.
Disclaimer: I wrote scrape.it