As the amount of information on the Internet is increasing substantially in this digital age, web scraping is becoming more and more popular. But to scrape website could become challenging in some cases. Why? Because these websites utilize many anti-scraping techniques to avoid being attacked by web scraping programs.
IP address detection
IP restriction is a common technique to prevent web scrapers from obtaining data on the website. As usual, web scrapers need to regularly visit the target websites and collect the data again and again. However, if you send out too many requests from a single IP address and the website has stringent regulations on scraping, you can get IP blocked.
To solve this problem, you should use good web scraping tools since they usually include features to mimic real people's activities online. Another way to deal with this is to employ proxy servers because they can hide your web scraping machine’s IP address. And when your scraper’s IP address is invisible, the target site is unable to block you if your tool goes past the site’s limitations.
CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a system that is used to make sure that a human being, not a machine, uses a computer. When you are surfing the Internet, it is commonly seen that a box will appear and require you to do some things to check whether you are human. Those tests involve clicking the CAPTCHA option, entering the CAPTCHA code, selecting the specified images from all the given images, or even solving equations.
Although conventional CAPTCHA can be cracked, it would cost you a lot. A better way to overcome this issue is by avoiding triggering CAPTCHA. You can change the delay time or keep rotating your IP address to lessen the chance of activating the test.
Login
Login is deemed necessary to get more access to many websites, especially social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. These web pages only give you information after you login. Therefore, to scrape websites like these, the scrapers will need to pretend that they have done the logging steps.
You can use web scraping tools that work by imitating human browsing behaviors to work around this hindrance.
Honeybot
A honeybot is a link that is unable to be seen by normal visitors but is visible for web scrapers. It is a trap deployed by website creators to detect scrapers by leading them to blank pages. When a visitor gets into a honeybot page, the website can realize that the visitor is not a human and would start banning requests from that client.
To avoid being caught in this trap, you can use XPath to carry out accurate capturing and clicking actions.
Different layouts on a web page
To prevent websites from being scraped easily, web page designers may create websites with various layouts. To solve this problem, you would need to write a set of new codes or make use of programs from web scraping tools.
The final words
The coding war between web scraping and anti-scraping techniques might never stop. Having known that, WINTR is always willing to lend a helping hand by offering you efficacious solutions for all of these issues. WINTR: https://www.wintr.com/ is a powerful and versatile tool for your scraping. It is a comprehensive tool to help your web scraping become as easy as pie. You can click on the link above to find out more information about this amazing web scraping tool.