Taking in a lot of data. Data hoovering was coined as a play on the Hoover vacuum cleaner, introduced in 1908. The year before, William Hoover purchased the vacuum cleaner business from James Spangler and popularized the product by having door-to-door salesmen demo the product to housewives. After a while, Hoover vacuums were in almost every household. Today, the Hoover brand is alive and well from Techtronic Industries.
Search engines and AI companies are known for their extensive capturing of the world's data. They "hoover up" a lot! See
big data and
AI training.