3 Anti scraping techniques you may encounter

Anti-Scraping Techniques are often used to block web scraping bots, and prevent their web info from being openly accessed.

While web scraping has been an effective and low-cost solution for businesses to fulfill their data acquisition needs, there is a non-stop coding war between spiders and anti-bots. And this is mainly because web scraping, if not done responsibly, can slow down the website or possibly crash it in the worst scenario. This is why some websites use different kinds of anti-scraping measures to discourage scraping activities.

1.IP

One of the easiest ways for a website to detect web scraping activities is through IP tracking. The website could identify whether the IP is a robot based on its behaviors. when a website finds out that an overwhelming number of requests had been sent from one single IP address periodically or within a short period of time, there is a good chance the IP would be blocked because it is suspected to be a bot. In this case, what really matters for building an anti-scraping crawler is the number and frequency of visits per unit of time. Here are some scenarios you may encounter.

2. Captcha

Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a public automatic program to determine whether the user is a human or a robot. This program would provide various challenges, such as degraded images, fill-in-the-blanks, or even equations, which are said to be solved by only a human.

3. Log-in

Many websites, especially social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, only show you information after you log in to the website. In order to crawl sites like these, the crawlers would need to simulate the logging steps as well.

After logging into the website, the crawler needs to save the cookies. A cookie is a small piece of data that stores browsing data for users. Without the cookies, the website would forget that you have already logged in and would ask you to log in again.

Moreover, some websites with strict scraping mechanisms may only allow partial access to the data, such as 1000 lines of data every day even after log-in.

With all that said, web scraping and anti-scraping techniques are making progress every day. Perhaps these techniques would be outdated when you are reading this article. However, you could always get help from us, from Relu Consultancy.