21–30 of 96 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the custom headers, you can actually trick a lot of sites with bot protection to let you load their sites (even big sites like youtube, which I have found success in)
How do you work around pop-ups for newsletters and such? Look at the BBC for a good example.
Funny, I saw this HN headline just after banning another scraper's IP range You're welcome to scrape my sites but please do it ethically. Idk how to define that but some examples of things I consider not cool: - Scraping without a contact method, or at least some unique identifier (like your project's codename), in the user agent string. This is common practice, see e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_head…
Is there a reason for using Selenium over something like Playwright? I haven't had very many positive experiences with selenium, and playwright I found is easier to use and more flexible. Also, for stuff like this: `modified_value = original_value.replace("HeadlessChrome", "Chrome")` There's quite a few ways to figure out that a browser is a bot, and I don't think replacing a few values like this does much. Not askin…
Last time I looked, Selenium was able to use Firefox. IDK about Playwright, but Puppeteer was Chrome-only.
I used to scrape back in the day when it was easy (literally just make a request and parse html). Seems cloudflare checkboxes / human verification are very commonplace nowdays. Curious how(/if) web scrapers get around those?
2. Outsourcing the task to one of the many CAPTCHA-solving services (2Captcha etc) – better
3. Using a pool of reliable IP addresses so you don't encounter checkboxes or turnstiles – best
I run a web scraping startup (https://simplescraper.io) and this is usually the approach[0]. It has become more difficult, and I think a lot of the AI crawlers are peeing in the pool with aggressive scraping, which is making the web a little bit worse for everyone.
[0] Worth mentioning that once you're "in" past the captcha, a smart scraper will try to use fetch to access more pages on the same domain so you only need to solve a fraction of possible captchas.
Funny, I saw this HN headline just after banning another scraper's IP range You're welcome to scrape my sites but please do it ethically. Idk how to define that but some examples of things I consider not cool: - Scraping without a contact method, or at least some unique identifier (like your project's codename), in the user agent string. This is common practice, see e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_head…
Google will also abandon page loads that take too long, and will demote rankings for that page (or the entire site!)
I used to scrape back in the day when it was easy (literally just make a request and parse html). Seems cloudflare checkboxes / human verification are very commonplace nowdays. Curious how(/if) web scrapers get around those?
1. Clicking the box programmatically – possible but inconsistent 2. Outsourcing the task to one of the many CAPTCHA-solving services (2Captcha etc) – better 3. Using a pool of reliable IP addresses so you don't encounter checkboxes or turnstiles – best I run a web scraping startup ( https://simplescraper.io ) and this is usually the approach[0]. It has become more difficult, and I think a lot of the AI crawlers are p…
First time hearing of the fetch() approach! If I understand correctly, regular browser automation might typically involve making separate GET requests for each page. Whereas the fetch() strategy involves making a GET for the first page (just as with regular browser automation), then after satisfying cloudflare, rather than going on to the next GET request, use fetch() to retrieve the rest of the pages you're after.
This approach is less noisy/impact on the server and therefore less likely to get noticed by bot detection.
This is fascinating stuff. (I'd previously used very little javascript in scrapes, preferring ruby, R, or python but this may tilt my tooling preferences toward using more js)
Funny, I saw this HN headline just after banning another scraper's IP range You're welcome to scrape my sites but please do it ethically. Idk how to define that but some examples of things I consider not cool: - Scraping without a contact method, or at least some unique identifier (like your project's codename), in the user agent string. This is common practice, see e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_head…
What sort of pages require 20 seconds to generate? This is extremely slow by most web standards and even your users would be frustrated by this. It sounds like poorly designed database queries with unindexed joins. Google will also abandon page loads that take too long, and will demote rankings for that page (or the entire site!)
Neither of those assumptions are correct. As an example, one page needs to look through 2.5 million records to find where the world record holder changed because it provides stats on who held the most records, held them for the greatest cumulative time, etc. The only thing to do would be introducing caching layers for parts of the computation, but for the number of users this system has, it's just not worth spending more development time than I already have. Also keep in mind it's a free web service and I don't run ads or anything, it's just a fan project for a game
> Google will ... demote rankings for that page (or the entire site!)
Google employs anticompetitive practices to maintain the search monopoly. We need more diversity in search engines, I don't know how else to encourage people to use something instead of, or at least in addition to, Google, besides by making Google Search just not competitive anymore. Google's crawler cannot access my site in the first place (but their other crawlers can; I'm pretty selective about this). My sites never show up in Google searches, on purpose
It's also not the whole site that's slow, it's when you click on a handful of specific pages. If that makes those pages not appear in search results, that's fine. Besides that it's not my loss, it's not like any other site has the info so people will find their way to the main page and click on what they want to see
I used to scrape back in the day when it was easy (literally just make a request and parse html). Seems cloudflare checkboxes / human verification are very commonplace nowdays. Curious how(/if) web scrapers get around those?
You can get a real browser[1] to check the box for you, then use the cookies in your "dumb" scraper.
Funny, I saw this HN headline just after banning another scraper's IP range You're welcome to scrape my sites but please do it ethically. Idk how to define that but some examples of things I consider not cool: - Scraping without a contact method, or at least some unique identifier (like your project's codename), in the user agent string. This is common practice, see e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_head…
What do you have for log analytics and ban automation? Could you say more about how to identify these bad-bots?
I just look at what's happening on my server every now and then. Sometimes not for months, but then when I set up a project like that caching proxy, I'm currently keeping a more regular eye to see that crawlers aren't bothering the upstream via me. Most respect the robots policy, most of the ones that don't set a user agent string that include the word 'bot' and so I know not to refresh the cache based on that request. So far it has mostly been Huawei who pretend to be a regular user but request millions of pages (from 12 separate IP ranges so far, some of them bigger than /16, some of them a handful of /24s).
> Could you say more about how to identify these bad-bots?
Many requests per day to random pages from either the same IP address (range), or ranges owned by the same corporation