#web-scraping

#web-scraping

"Google is the largest scraper in the world," the company said in a blog post on Friday. "Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal."

The jury's out on screen scraping versus official APIs. And the truth is, any AI agent worth its salt will likely need a mixture of both. AI agent development is off to the races. A 2025 survey from PwC found that AI agents are already being adopted at nearly 80% of companies. And, these agents have an insatiable lust for data: 42% of enterprises need access to eight or more data sources to deploy AI agents successfully, according to a 2024 Tray.ai study.

"Plaintiff has established that Defendant crashed its website, slowed it, and damaged the servers, and Defendant admitted to the same by way of default," the ruling said.

Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results, targeting a firm called SerpApi that has turned Google's 10 blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google's terms to scrape and resell its search engine results pages (SERPs). This is not the first action against SerpApi, but Google's decision to go after a scraper could signal a new, more aggressive stance on protecting its search data.

The Times alleged in its filing that Perplexity engaged in "large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution" of millions of its articles to build its AI-powered "answer engine." The complaint argued that Perplexity's products directly substitute for the newspaper's own content, thereby undermining its business and devaluing its journalism. Perplexity's conduct "threatens this legacy and impedes the free press's ability to continue playing its role in supporting an informed citizenry and a healthy democracy," the Times argued.

Its answer engine simply uses a different company's large language model to parse through a massive number of Google search results to see if it can answer a user's question based on those results. But Perplexity can only run its 'answer engine' by wrongfully accessing and scraping Reddit content appearing in Google's own search results from Google's own search engine.

caniscrape checks a website for common anti-bot mechanisms and reports: A difficulty score (0-10) Which protections are active (e.g., Cloudflare, Akamai, hCaptcha, etc.) What tools you'll likely need (headless browsers, proxies, CAPTCHA solvers, etc.) Whether using a scraping API might be better This helps you decide the right scraping approach before you waste time building a bot that keeps getting blocked.

The UK is one of the world's worst performers when it comes to protecting against bots - though most countries are pretty poor. That's according to DataDome, which states that only 1.8% of large UK domains are fully protected against bots, compared with a Europe-wide average of 2.5% and a global average of 2.8%. Bigger organizations are no better than smaller ones, with only 2% of domains with more than 30 million monthly visits fully protected.

"It's a rip off 'Find my Friends.' I was able to reverse engineer the SF parking ticket system so I could see close to real time where parking tickets were issued in the city. And I was making a map of where the actual parking cops were as they traverse the city and issue tickets. In theory, you could use that to avoid them and avoid a ticket," said Walz.

Headless browsers - the behind-the-scenes software that lets machines surf the web like people - were once the domain of quality-assurance testers and SEO agencies. But new AI-powered browsers launched this last year - like Perplexity's Comet and Browser Company of New York's Dia - are bringing new meaning to the term. These players are using headless browsers to power AI agents that need to click, scroll and interact with websites as a human would, to retrieve information.

Web scraping delivers competitive intelligence for online course providers, giving them a strategic edge in the market. This intelligence helps in building stronger courses that can sell better.

This quiz consists of seven questions that test knowledge on core concepts of web scraping using Python, focusing on Beautiful Soup and MechanicalSoup.

Targeted campaigns, effective publisher selection, and real-time optimization can drive scalable growth for crypto brands, showcasing the importance of strategic marketing in this sector.

The Machine Economy represents not just process optimization but a profound shift in the underlying forces that drive economics, as machines take more control over economic functions.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that enables large language models to interact with external tools and data through a standardized interface.

The easiest way to detect when a website is using Kasada is by asking it for Wappalyzer, which has a browser extension you can use while visiting a website to detect its tech stack.