From the docs:<p>'''<p>* Node.js [...]<p>* jQuery [...]<p>[...]<p>This approach has become my hammer when web scraping tasks come up.<p>'''<p>If all you have is a hammer, you may find yourself noticing that objects become more nail-like :).
I have also found node+jQuery an effective web crawling combination. In particular the cheerio library <a href="https://github.com/MatthewMueller/cheerio" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/MatthewMueller/cheerio</a> greatly simplifies data extraction. And as others have mentioned, the asynchronous nature of node is perfectly suited to crawling (as long as you take care not to accidentally DDOS the target site).
If you really want to scrape pages, you should use something like <a href="https://github.com/chriso/node.io/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chriso/node.io/</a> which batches things in jobs, helps with error handling, io, etc...
Does Node have anything like Mechanize? Handling cookie state and such is something that is much more useful than the selector functionality of jQuery...which is great, but not any better than what Nokogiri offers.