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Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

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21–30 of 102 posts

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#21
post #15

how do you avoid getting banned by the companies you scrape? Most ToSs have a clause like: > We prohibit crawling, scraping, caching or otherwise accessing any content on the Service via automated means... [etc]

This may now be moot after the LinkedIn Vs hiq labs case a couple of days ago which appears to have blanket legalised we scraping.

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#22
post #15

how do you avoid getting banned by the companies you scrape? Most ToSs have a clause like: > We prohibit crawling, scraping, caching or otherwise accessing any content on the Service via automated means... [etc]

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft-linked...

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#23

Very cool, but super slow, especially for an API point, which I would expect you could use directly from a front end. Tested on a site I regularly visit dashblock (3 selectors, ~20 items): 16.911 seconds curl (no scraping): 60 ms chrome: 987 ms edit: added chrome

Indeed, we are rendering the whole page with the javascript, that's why it takes longer than a curl. For now, it's especially useful for dynamic pages but we also plan on supporting pages that don't require rendering.

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#25
post #9

Congrats on the launch! Look forward to playing around with it. I remember a similar startup making quite a splash on HN a few years ago — http://www.kimonolabs.com/ . Do you know why they shut it down and what you guys are doing differently?

Thank you! Kimono Labs built an amazing product and has been finally acquired by Palantir. The main difference between us comes from our machine learning model that gives stability to extraction over time and parse webpages in a generic way. We are also working on automating navigation, which is something they didn't do =)

How would you compare to something like UiPath? Congrats on the launch.

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#26

Very cool, but super slow, especially for an API point, which I would expect you could use directly from a front end. Tested on a site I regularly visit dashblock (3 selectors, ~20 items): 16.911 seconds curl (no scraping): 60 ms chrome: 987 ms edit: added chrome

Indeed, we are rendering the whole page with the javascript, that's why it takes longer than a curl. For now, it's especially useful for dynamic pages but we also plan on supporting pages that don't require rendering.

Maybe you already do it, but I think integrating adblocker functionality when loading JS sites would be desirable to reduce load time. And if ads are what the API user is interested in, perhaps add a flag for whether or not one wants ads to load.

Recommendation: https://github.com/cliqz-oss/adblocker Should be the fastest adblocker library (used by Ghostery, Cliqz and Brave)

Re: Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API

#28
This is cool, looking forward to trying it out. Manual scraping is doable, but there have been plenty of times that I've just decided not to do something because I'd have to spend an hour getting/scraping the data. Hopefully this will take that time down to 10 minutes or less.
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