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 asking you to reveal any tricks, just saying that if you're using something like Playwright, you can e.g. run scripts in the browser to adjust your fingerprint more easily.
I am looking to refactor a lot of this, and switching over to playwright is a high priority, using something like camoufox for scraping, instead of just chromium.
Most of my work on this the past month has been simple additions that are nice to haves
Currently working on a PR to swap over
Just request the html and cap down all the other stuff
PS: I also think this has the nice side-effect of you consuming less resources (that you didnt care about/need anyways) from the server, so win win
I've used XPath for crawling with selenium, and it used to be my favorite way, but turned out quite unreliable if you don't combine it with other selectors as certain website are really badly designed and have no good patterns. So what's the added value over pure selenium?
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.
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(<url>) 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)
You can get a real browser[1] to check the box for you, then use the cookies in your "dumb" scraper.
If that's not good enough you'll likely have to fiddle with your own web driver and possibly a computer vision rig to manage to click through 'find the motorcycle' kind of challenges. Paying a click farm to do it for you is probably cheaper in the short run.
An important hurdle is getting reputable IPv4 addresses to do it from, if you're going to do it a lot. Having or renting a botnet could help, but might be too illegal for your use case.
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_header#Format_for_a...>. Many sites mention in public API guidelines to include an email address so you can be contacted in case of problems. If you don't include this and you're causing trouble, all I can do is ban your IP address altogether (or entire ranges: if you hop between several IPs I'll have to assume you have access to the whole range). Nobody likes IP bans: you have to get a new IP, your provider has a burned IP address, the next customer runs into issues... don't be this person, include an identifier.
- Timing out the request after a few seconds.
Some pages on my site involve number crunching and take 20 seconds to load. I could add complexity to do this async instead, but, by having it live, the regular users get the latest info and they know to just wait a few seconds and everybody is happy. Even the scrapers can get the info, I'm fine computing those pages for you. But if you ask for me to do work and then walk away, that's just rude. It shows up in my logs as HTTP status 499 and I'll ban scrapers that I notice doing this regularly
- Ignoring robots.txt.
I have exactly 1 entry in there, and that's a caching proxy for another site that is struggling with load. If you ignore the robots file and just crawl the thing from A to Z at a high rate, that causes a lot of requests to the upstream site for updating stale caches. You can obviously expect a ban because it's again just a waste of resources
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
So i'd expect an uptick in bots as everyone races to try and compete with google on data hoarding
However, I see the development of new bot types that tackle security in more aggressive ways. It's not just simple SQL injection as it was before, but more sophisticated and custom bots that not only request but also push a lot.
Or just a couple of days ago, I found a new type of bot that "brute-forces" website folder structure. ~205,000 requests in a couple of days.
These new bots are probably not directly the work of AI, but they seem to be a consequence of it.
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 agree about Google being shit. However, my website makes my living, and feeds and clothes my children, so I have to play along to their rules, or suffer.
Please take your slowest performing query and run it with EXPLAIN in front. And share that (or dump it into an LLM and it will tell you have to fix it)
Instead of immediately concluding that the person actually building the system is an incompetent fool who doesn't know any better, maybe work on the assumption that they know what they're doing, and have already considered the various trade-offs.
If nothing else, that would be considerably less obnoxious.
I find it amusing that you think every database operation imaginable can be performed in less than 20 seconds if we throw in a few indexes. Some things are slow no matter how much you optimise them.
The GP could have implemented them as async endpoints, or callbacks, but obviously they've already considered those options.
I bet the GP abstracts out a function the second there's a third callsite too, regardless of where it's used or how it will evolved - only to add an options argument and blow up the cyclomatic complexity three days later.
But of course, the ones behaving badly tend to not respect the robots.txt, so you end up banning the IP or IP block.
And here, I am a nice guy, the crawler must really be a piece of crap for me to start to block.
This is a very effective way to make sure you won't get any scraping done!
I only check most places once a week so I use the LLM to do the scraping but there are a few cases where I have to scrape thousands of pages very frequently so I use the more deterministic script it generates instead.
Works ok. Not as automated as I’d like
I am looking for a way to throw an address at a planning authority (UK) and download the associated documents for that property. Could this or another tool help?
e.g.
https://publicaccess.barnet.gov.uk/online-applications/appli...
As pure random example.
A property can have multiple planning applications and under each many documents.
What I have found useful (saved me time and potential lost £££) is to take the documents, combine to single pdf and provide to Gemini 2.5 Pro and then ask it to validate against agent specification for a property.
Over the weekend found a place that was advertising a feature of the house that was explicitly prohibited through planning decision notice.
Called the Agent up on it who claimed no knowledge but said this would have come up through solicitor checks, which it would have done, much later down the process with more or my money spent and considerable time lost.
Of course all this possible without LLMs but just makes it easier/cheaper to check at scale.
I'd keep it simple like that until I need to do periodic comparisons, i.e. actually need scrapers and is prepared to build what's needed to automatically watch and process directories where the scrapers put the files.
When using Scraperr, please remember to:
Respect robots.txt
Terms of Service
Rate Limiting
Kudos for promoting ethical usage; makes a change from some of the grifters selling borderline ddos-bots as crawlers.
iSloth•1d ago