Most of the time, you need to fallback to a headless browser and good proxy/user agent management.ĭataDome, PerimeterX, and others have also proven themselves to be challenging to bypass in 2021. Whilst the vanilla Cloudflare anti-bot can still be bypassed relatively easily, when a website is using the advanced version it can be quite challenging to deal with. Not necessarily because it is the best anti-bot, but because it is the most widely used. Of all the anti-bot solutions out there, Cloudflare probably was the most widespread pain in the a** for web scrapers. However, whilst scraping a website might be still possible, anti-bots can make it not worth the effort and cost if you have to resort to ever more expensive web scraping setups (using headless browsers with residential/mobile IP networks, etc). With the right combination of proxies, user agents and browsers, you can scrape every website. They are increasingly moving away from simple header and IP fingerprinting, to more complicated browser and TCP fingerprinting with webRTC, canvas fingerprinting and analysing mouse movements so that they can differentiate automated scrapers from real-users.īut as of yet no anti-bot has found the magic bullet to completely prevent web scrapers. Websites and anti-bot providers have continued to develop more sophisticated anti-bot measures. The endless war between web scrapers and websites trying to block them continued unabated in 2021, with web scrapers still largely staying one step ahead. Not only are the optics better, but the profit margins are significantly higher too! 2022 Outlook Įxpect to see more existing web scraping players and new entrants focus on becoming data feed providers, instead of being web-scraping-as-a-service or proxy providers. Or maybe, just people and companies don't want web data as much anymore, who knows. In 2021, two of the largest players in web scraping, Luminati and Scrapinghub, rebranded to "Bright Data" and "Zyte" respectively, highlighting the shift away from web scraping to a more data focus. The term "web scraping" is falling out of fashion in favour of terms like "data feeds" and "data extraction". so companies aren't building their own in-house web scraping infrastructures. More companies offering ready made product monitoring tools for e-commerce, etc.Growing number of companies offering industry specific data feeds (product info, SERP results, etc.) so people don't have to scrape the data themselves.It's hard to know for sure, but it is likely a combination of: Google searches for the term "web scraping" have dropped 30-40% compared to 2020 volumes. Fighting Dirty: Increased Use of Pressure TacticsĪfter consistent growth in interest every year over the last 10 years, 2021 seems to have been a year when "web scraping" became uncool.Legal Issues: Maybe A Little Less Grey?.Including the good, the bad, and the ugly: With 2021 having come to an end, now is the time to look back at the big events & trends in the world of web scraping, and try to project what will 2022 look like for web scraping.
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