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Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library

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Re: Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library

#21
post #17

I found crawlee a few days ago while figuring out a stack for a project. I wanted a python library but found crawlee with typescript so much easier that I ended up coding the entire project in less than a week in Typescript+Crawlee+Playwright I found the api a lot better than any python scraping api till date. However I am tempted to try out python with Crawlee. The playwright integration with gotScraping makes the e…

would love to have your feedback on the python one too :)

Re: Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library

#22
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a fair and totally reasonable question but clashes with reality. Many hosts have data that others want/like to scrape (eBay, Amazon, Google, airlines, etc.) and they setup anti-scraping mechanisms to try and prevent scraping. Whether or not to respect those desires is a bigger question but not one for the scraping library - it’s one for those doing the scraping and their lawyers. The fact is - many many people w…

Ah yes, the old 'if I don't build the bombs for them, someone else will'. I don't think this is taking the moral high ground, this is saying we don't care whether it's moral, there's demand and we'll build it.

There are many legitimate and legal use cases where one might want to circumvent blocking of bots. We believe that everyone has the moral right to access and fairly use non-personal publicly available data on the web the way they want, not just the way the publishers want them to. This is the core founding principle of the open web, which allowed the web to become what it is today.

BTW we continuously update this exhaustive post covering all legal aspects of web scraping: https://blog.apify.com/is-web-scraping-legal/

Re: Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the old 'if I don't build the bombs for them, someone else will'. I don't think this is taking the moral high ground, this is saying we don't care whether it's moral, there's demand and we'll build it.

I'm not gonna feel bad if a corporation gets its data scraped (whenever it's legal to do so, and this is another kind of question I'm not knowledgeable enough to face) when they themselves try to scrape other companies' data

You seem to have a massive category error here. To my understanding, this is not only going to circumvent the scraping protection of companies that scrape other people's data.

Re: Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library

#28

Does it have support for web scraping opt-out protocols, such as Robots.txt, HTTP and content tags? These are getting more important now, especially in the EU after the DSM directive.

Not yet, but it’s on the roadmap

Re: Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library

#29
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a fair and totally reasonable question but clashes with reality. Many hosts have data that others want/like to scrape (eBay, Amazon, Google, airlines, etc.) and they setup anti-scraping mechanisms to try and prevent scraping. Whether or not to respect those desires is a bigger question but not one for the scraping library - it’s one for those doing the scraping and their lawyers. The fact is - many many people w…

Ah yes, the old 'if I don't build the bombs for them, someone else will'. I don't think this is taking the moral high ground, this is saying we don't care whether it's moral, there's demand and we'll build it.

Google and Amazon where built on scrapped data, who are you kidding?

Re: Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library

#30
post #6
post #5

How is this different from Scrapy?

hey intev, - Crawlee has out-of-the-box support for headless browser crawling (Playwright). You don't have to install any plugin or set up the middleware. - Crawlee has a minimalistic & elegant interface - Set up your scraper with fewer than 10 lines of code. You don't have to care about what middleware, settings, and anything are or need to be changed, on the top that we also have templates which makes the learning…

> You don't have to install any plugin or set up the middleware.

That cuts both ways, in true 80/20 fashion: it also means that anyone who isn't on the happy path of the way that crawlee was designed is going to have to edit your python files (`pip install -e` type business) to achieve their goals

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