Did you know that the global web scraping market will cross USD 3.52B by 2037, at a CAGR of 13.2%?
Do you know that 48% of web scraping users belong to the eCommerce industry to fetch competitor insights?
It is obvious, keeping in mind the unlimited power data brings to the table. Experts believe that data is the new power.
Getting competitor insights can be a big game-changer for businesses to make proactive, data-driven decisions.
Web scraping is one of the most used techniques to scrape data from websites and other sources. It offers valuable insights to businesses, including pricing intelligence, inventory details, market trends & predictions, discount offers, and customer sentiment.
However, web scraping also has its own limitations. Before you start scraping details from your competitors’ websites, it is recommended that you know about web scraping limitations and challenges.
In this blog, we will discuss web scraping limitations and challenges, such as legal, technical, operational, and ethical, in detail to give you a comprehensive view on the matter.
Web Scraping Limitations: Legal
Web scraping is not magic. The most critical and often ignored limitation
is the legal landscape. You just cannot scrape a website just like that. You just cannot use data that is publicly available, especially for commercial purposes.
You need to understand the legal aspects and possible legal consequences before you start web scraping for websites. Reckless scraping might lead to legal consequences and financial penalties.
Terms of Service and Contract Law
You will find Terms of Service (ToS) or Terms of Use in any website. Mostly, the website you visit asks you to accept the terms of service before you visit any page.
These documents contain explicit clauses that prohibit various things like automated data extraction, crawling, or scraping. You need to read these documents before you employ a web scraping tool for data extraction.
By ignoring the web scraping limitation, clearly mentioned in the ToS, you are in a clear violation, facilitating website owners to take legal action.
What You Can Do?
It is crucial for businesses to read ToS first. If the website allows the use of an API, you can use it for data extraction. Furthermore, you can also ask them directly by reaching out to them with a data scraping request.
Copyright & Intellectual Property
Data can also be original and intellectual property of the website owner. In that case, you cannot just extract data without any prior permission.
Scraping and then republishing or selling or using the large portions of copyrighted content, without permission, can lead to a copyright infringement lawsuit. Database rights are too complex in nature and are taken very seriously in the regions like Europe and the USA. Violating such laws might lead to financial penalties and other issues.
What You Can Do?
If you are scraping copyrighted data for personal research or non-commercial use, it is considered under “fair use” provisions. However, using it commercially is a risky affair. Web scraping companies should stay away from using such sensitive data commercially to avoid legal consequences.
Data Privacy Regulations like GDPR and CCPA
When you are dealing with Personal Identifiable Information (PII), you have to be very cautious and alert as it is a complex and sensitive affair.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are data regulation authorities that impose various strict rules on collecting, processing, storing, and using personal data of users. This personal data can be name, email address, phone number, social media profiles, and home or office address. You just cannot scrape PII data without an individual’s consent. It might lead to massive fines and hurt your brand’s reputation.
What You Can Do?
The best practice is not to use scrape PII. However, if you have to scrape names, email addresses, or phone numbers, ensure that you don’t cross legal boundaries. To scrape data from organizations that are covered by GDPR/CCPA, explicit consent is required.
The robots.txt Protocol
The robots.txt is a web standard that manages and controls bot traffic.
The robots.txt file is located deep inside a website and it is a set of guidelines that tells website visitors and crawlers not to use a particular section of the website for scraping or crawling purposes.
Though it is not a legal mandate to keep in mind the robots.txt protocol during a web scraping project, it is a poor and unethical practice and can be used against you.
What You Can Do?
Always respect the robots.txt file and adhere to its guidelines.
Web Scraping Limitations: Technical
There are various technical web scraping limitations that you need to consider while extracting data from websites. Most website owners have placed countermeasures to protect their server resources and proprietary data. Here, the battle between scrapers and anti-bot technology becomes ugly.
Dynamic Content and JavaScript Rendering
Earlier, websites used to have static HTML content that can be easily parsed by simple scripts. However, that is not the case now. Today, modern websites have dynamic content and cannot be parsed easily.
Modern websites use client-side technologies like JavaScript and AJAX to load valuable data like product listings, stock prices, or news feeds. If you are using a simple Python library with the capabilities of fetching the initial HTML, you will be able to fetch only a shell of the page, without any actual content.
They need to use a process called JavaScript rendering to execute the JavaScript.
What Can You Do?
You can use resource-intensive tools like headless browsers that can be used to execute JavaScript. These browsers can run without a graphical interface and are too slow and will require more time and consume far more CPU and memory.
Anti-Scraping Mechanisms and IP Bans
Most websites monitor web traffic with specialized tools to identify automated bots. These bots typically request pages far more faster and consistently than humans.
If a site detects a bot, it will employ countermeasures like rate limiting, IP blocking, CAPTCHAs, Honeypot Traps, etc.
What Can You Do?
Website scrappers must always use proxy rotation services to cycle through thousands of IP addresses. Furthermore, implementing randomized delays between requests can also help as it mimics human behavior. Some web scraping companies also use third-party CAPTCHA-solving services to pass through CAPTCHAs.
Website Structure Volatility
Advanced website developers frequently update website layouts, CSS classes, and HTML structures. Here the real problem starts. Mostly web scrapers rely on specific selectors to locate and extract data on a page. If a website changes its structure, even a minor change, the scraper will break and fail to find the target element. It will provide inconsistent or inaccurate data.
What Can You Do?
Scrapers must monitor website structure consistently with the strong code and flexible scrapers that can understand the nuances of the names and CSS classes. However, it might increase their maintenance costs.
Login Requirements and Authentication
Sometimes, websites store valuable data behind a user authentication wall. In such a scenario, to scrape the website, you must automate the login process. It can be done by sending credentials and managing session cookies.
However, it is complex to write such programs and it will be a clear violation of the website’s ToS. Most ToS rules prohibit any third-party to share accounts and use automated methods to access authenticated areas.
What Can You Do?
Though you can automate the login process and extract valuable data easily, with headless browsers. Experts don’t recommend it as you might face legal or financial consequences.
Web Scraping Limitations: Data Quality & Scalability
Apart from legal and technical limitations of web scraping, there are some limitations related to data and operation scalability that you need to focus on.
Data Cleanliness and Inconsistencies
Data scrapers will collect data in its original format like messy, unstructured, and inconsistent. You will have missing fields, inconsistent formatting, and non-relevant data that are of no use.
What You Can Do?
You must allocate time to data cleanliness such as post-processing cleaning and validation to make the data usable and fetch actionable insights.
High Cost of Infrastructure and Scale
When you want to extract data from multiple websites and thousands of pages, the infrastructure cost will also increase and it might be a limitation of web scraping for you.
When you use headless browsers for JavaScript rendering, they are resource-intensive and will require virtual machines and cloud resources to handle the load. It might spike costs to a great extent.
Also, to counter bots and avoid being blocked, you will require to purchase and manage a large pool of rotating residential proxies. It will also increase the cost.
Also, when you have a large pool of scraped data, you have to store and manage it through scalable database solutions and significant bandwidth usage.
What You Can Do?
You need to establish professional cloud infrastructure, dedicated maintenance teams, and significant financial resources to store and manage scraped data.
The Time-Sensitivity of Extracted Data
Sometimes, data has a short shelf-life and after some period, this data is of no use. For example, data like stock prices, job postings, or product discounts change constantly. This is a common web scraping limitation for financial or market intelligence projects and must be dealt accordingly.
What You Can Do?
You will need a consistent, continuous, and high-frequency scraping schedule that runs every few minutes or hours.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, web scraping limitations are real and must be dealt with care. An effective data scraping strategy also incorporates web scraping limitations and appropriate efforts to counter them.
We have discussed web scraping limitations in detail with possible solutions to give you a 360-degree view of the topic. Make sure that you keep in mind these limitations to avoid any legal and financial consequences. Hire a professional web scraping company for the job as they have technical resources and a professional team to handle these limitations professionally.
