6 Web Scraping Challenges

No doubt, website scraping has become a hot topic amongst people. Now, more and more people are striving hard to extract data from websites so that their business can reach great heights in the future. Data provides the business owners with latest market trends, customer preferences and competitors activities. Therefore, website scraping services is more about gaining essential tactics for the business than just collecting data. On the other hand, a number of challenges occur on the way like blocking mechanism which stop people from getting the data from multiple websites.

So in this blog, let’s take a look at the web scraping challenges in detail.

· Bot access: The first and foremost thing that you need to check is if your targeted website allows you to scrap or not. If you find out that it isn't allowing for scraping purposes, then you need to ask the website owner for the permission. If the website owner disagrees, then you need to find another website that offers similar information.

· IP blocking: IP blocking is considered as a way in which web scrapers aren't given the permission to access the data of the website. This situation usually occurs when the website receives high number of requests from the same IP address. In that case, the website either bans IP or restricts its access.

· Dynamic web content: It has been seen that most of the websites apply AJAX to update the dynamic web content on a regular basis. It is could be convenient for the users to view the details of the product or service but it could prove to be inconvenient for the scrapers as it would be difficult for them to extract data.

· Login requirement: Most of the protected websites may ask you to log in first. After you submit your login details, your browser appends the cookies to multiple request you make on the way of scrapping. But it is important for you to ensure the fact that cookies are being sent to you with the requests on the way of scraping websites.

· Slow load speed: In some of the cases, websites made failed to load when they receive a number of access request altogether. This couldn't be an issue when humans browse the website as they just reload the webpage and wait for the website to reappear. But web and data scrapping bought me break down as it isn't aware how to deal with such kind of emergency.

· Complicated web page structures: As most of the web pages are based upon HTML, so the designers have their own standards to design the web pages and this results in the webpage structures being divergent. And when scrapping needs arises, whether you need to build one scraper for each website or you need to contact the professional website scraping services provider for this concern.

Obviously, there will be more challenges in the web scraping field in the future. But it is more important that you treat all the websites nicely and do not overload it.