Web scraping has become a hot topic among people with rising demands for big data. More and more people hunger for data from multiple websites to help with their business development. However, many challenges, such as blocking mechanisms, will rise when web scraping processes scale, which can hinder people from getting data. Let’s look at these challenges in detail.
Web scraping may not work because of
1. Bot access
The first thing to check is if your target website allows for scraping before you start it. If you find it disallowed for scraping via its robots.txt, you can ask the web owner to scrap permission, explaining your scraping needs and purposes. If the owner still disagrees, it’s better to find an alternative site that has similar information.
2. Complicated and changeable web page structures
Most web pages are based on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Web page designers can have their own standards to design the pages, so web page structures are widely divergent. If you need to scrape multiple websites, you need to build one scraper for each website.
Moreover, websites periodically update their content to improve the user experience or add new features, which often leads to structural changes on the web page. Since web scrapers are set up according to a certain design of the page, they would not work for the updated page. Sometimes even a minor change in the target website requires you to adjust the scraper.
Octoparse uses customized workflows to simulate human behavior so as to deal with different pages. You can modify the workflow to make it easier to adapt to the new pages.
3. IP blocking
IP blocking is a common method to stop web scrapers from accessing data of a website. This typically happens when a website detects a high number of requests from the same IP address. The website would either totally ban the IP or restrict its access to break down the scraping process.
There are many IP proxy services like Luminati and Oxylabs, that can be integrated with automated scrapers, saving people from such blocking.
Oxylabs offers 100M+ Residential Proxies from all around the world. The ethically obtained and continuously growing residential proxy pool will fit any business needs, no matter the scale.
Octoparse Cloud extraction utilizes multiple IPs to scrape one website at a time to not only make sure one IP is not requested too many times but also to keep the high speed.
4. CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is often used to separate humans from scraping tools by displaying images or logical problems that humans find easy to solve but scrapers don’t.
Many CAPTCHA solvers can be implemented into bots to ensure non-stopping scrapes. Although the technologies to overcome CAPTCHA can help acquire continuous data feeds, they could still slow down the scraping process a bit.
5. Honeypot traps
Honeypot is a trap the website owner puts on the page to catch scrapers. The traps can be links that are invisible to humans but visible to scrapers. Once a scraper falls into the trap, the website can use the information it receives (e.g. its IP address) to block that scraper.
Octoparse uses XPath to precisely locate items to click or scrape, which largely reduces the chance of falling into the trap.
6. Slow/unstable load speed
Websites may respond slowly or even fail to load when receiving too many access requests. That is not a problem when humans browse the site as they just need to reload the web page and wait for the website to recover. But scraping may be broken up as the scraper does not know how to deal with such an emergency.
Octoparse allows users to set up an auto-retry or retry loading when certain conditions are met to resolve the issue. You can even execute customized workflows under preset situations.
7. Dynamic content
Many websites apply AJAX to update dynamic web content. Examples are lazy loading images, infinite scrolling and showing more info by clicking a button via AJAX calls. It is convenient for users to view more data on such kind of websites but not for scrapers.
Octoparse can easily scrape those websites with different functions like scrolling down the page or AJAX Load.
8. Login requirements
Some protected information may require you to log in first. Once you submit your login credentials, your browser automatically appends the cookie value to multiple requests you make your way to most sites, so the website knows you’re the same person who just logged in earlier. So when scraping websites requiring a login, be sure that cookies have been sent with the requests.
Octoparse can simply help users to log in to a website and save the cookies just like a browser does.
9. Real-time data scraping
Real-time data scraping is essential when it comes to price comparison, inventory tracking, etc. The data can change in the blink of an eye and may lead to huge capital gains for a business. The scraper needs to monitor the websites all the time and scrape data. Even so, there is still some delay as the request and data delivery will take time. Furthermore, acquiring a large amount of data in real-time is a big challenge, too.
Octoparse scheduled Cloud extraction can scrape websites at a minimum interval of 5 minutes to achieve nearly real-time scraping.
There will certainly be more challenges in web scraping in the future but the universal principle for scraping is always the same: treat the websites nicely. Do not try to overload it. What’s more, you can always find a web scraping tool or service such as Octoparse to help you handle the scraping job.
