Data scraping or web scraping has emerged as a reliable process for businesses to extract valuable data from multiple sources. It allows organizations to customize their offerings, personalize the customer experience, and gain a competitive edge. Although web scraping displays promising potential and capabilities, it does experience some challenges along the way. After all, working with data requires a nuanced approach to ensure that you make the best of the available resources.
Here is a deep dive into the various challenges that businesses might face when using web scraping services—along with practical solutions for overcoming these issues.
IP Blocks
If a website discovers that an IP address is being used to make fraudulent or excessive requests, it may be blocked, or rate limited. This may block or reduce continuous scraping until the restriction is lifted, which is especially important if the bot makes a huge number of requests using a single IP address.
Solution: The solution is to set up a web scraping proxy that uses a different IP address for each request. Free IP addresses are not advised because they are likely to fail.
Additionally, monitoring the scraper, adhering to website terms of service, and delaying requests help prevent IP blocks.
Browser Fingerprinting
Every time you visit a website, your web browser sends information to it. This transaction enables a server to determine the type of content intended for a user. The server selects language options, layout choices, and other characteristics, as well as collecting details about the web browser, operating system, and device being used. Even basic information, such as the browsing language and user agent, might be identified by the destination server.
Websites capture user information and associate it with a specific digital fingerprint. This digital fingerprinting often poses a significant challenge for web scraping services. It allows websites to detect and block scraping activities, thereby disrupting data collection.
Solution: To prevent browser fingerprinting from interfering with web scraping services, use a headless browser or one of the HTTP request libraries to manually create a custom fingerprint. Combining user agents with accompanying HTTP headers ensures that a browser sends successful HTTP(S) queries.
Website Structure Modifications
Website structure changes often occur in the layout, design, or underlying programming of a website. Web crawlers are designed to navigate and index a website by analyzing its JavaScript and HTML components, which the website designer or developer might change to improve the website’s appearance and appeal. If the HTML components change, even if only slightly, the data parser will be unable to extract accurate data and will require code updates to match the new changes in the target page.
Data parsers are designed to work with the original layout of a webpage. Alterations to this architecture may impair their ability to precisely detect and scrape the relevant data. To keep the scraper functional, the developer must examine and modify the parsers in tune with the new page structure.
Solution: Use a specialized parser tailored for the specific target website, and ensure it is flexible enough to adapt to any changes that occur. This adaptability is crucial in addressing the web scraping challenges that arise from website modifications. By doing so, data scraping services maintain accuracy and efficiency even as the website evolves.
Scalability
Staying competitive requires a blend of strategies like price optimization, market analysis, demand forecasting, etc. Such estimates are based on large volumes of publicly available data. Plus, this system needs to be elastic enough to manage the data volume fluctuations while also staying quick and responsive.
Building such a highly scalable web scraping infrastructure is often out of reach for small businesses and startups due to the enormous time, effort, and software/hardware costs needed.
Solution: Use a scalable online scraping system that is able to handle a large number of requests, has limitless bandwidth, and gets data quickly. Infrastructure as service (IaaS) platforms give a variety of APIs that you may include into your existing system. Web scraping companies also come in handy as they help businesses reduce the burden on internal resources.
Ethical Concerns
Apart from following regulations while scraping, you must also adhere to an ethical code of conduct. For example, it is not technically illegal to create a web scraper that sends thousands of requests per second to a site’s server. However, doing so is unethical as it might significantly slow down the website.
Solution: Limit the number of requests. It’s important to implement such measures to ensure you are respecting the website owner and preventing your scrapers from unintentionally harming their site or disrupting the experience of their users.
Conclusion
In addition to the challenges we’ve discussed in this post, there are certainly other obstacles and limitations in web scraping. However, a key principle remains—treat websites respectfully and avoid overloading them. For a smoother and more efficient web scraping experience, consider using a specialized tool or service to manage the task for you. Data scraping companies also provide tailored solutions, ensuring compliance with best practices while efficiently handling large-scale scraping needs.
