I use a tool that downloads a website to check for new chapters of series every day, then creates an RSS feed with the contents. Would this be considered a harmful scraper?
The problem with AI scrapers and bots is their scale, thousands of requests to webpages that the internal server cannot handle, resulting in slow traffic.
Seems like an api request would be preferable for the site you’re checking. I don’t imagine they’re unhappy with the traffic if they haven’t blocked it yet
As far as I know, the website doesn’t have an API but I just download the HTML and format the result with a simple Python script, it makes around 10 to 20 requests, one for each series I’m following at each time.
That might/might not be much.
Depends upon the site, I’d say.
e.g. If it’s something like Netflix, I wouldn’t think much, because they have the means to serve the requests.
But for some PeerTube instance, even a single request seems to be too heavy for them. So if that server does not respond to my request, I usually wait for an hour or so before refreshing the page.
The problem is these are constant army hordes / datacentres. You have one tool. Sending a few requests from your device wouldn’t even dent a raspberry pi, nevermind a beefier server
I think the intention of traffic is also important. Your tool is so you can consume the content freely provided by the website. Their tool is so they can profit off of the work on the website.
I really feel like scrapers should have been outlawed or actioned at some point.
I use a tool that downloads a website to check for new chapters of series every day, then creates an RSS feed with the contents. Would this be considered a harmful scraper?
The problem with AI scrapers and bots is their scale, thousands of requests to webpages that the internal server cannot handle, resulting in slow traffic.
Seems like an api request would be preferable for the site you’re checking. I don’t imagine they’re unhappy with the traffic if they haven’t blocked it yet
I mean if it’s cms site there may not be an api, this would be the only solution in that case
If the site is getting slowed at times (regardless of whether it is when you scrape), you might want to not scrape at all.
Probably not a good idea to download the whole site, but then that depends upon the site.
As far as I know, the website doesn’t have an API but I just download the HTML and format the result with a simple Python script, it makes around 10 to 20 requests, one for each series I’m following at each time.
That might/might not be much.
Depends upon the site, I’d say.
e.g. If it’s something like Netflix, I wouldn’t think much, because they have the means to serve the requests.
But for some PeerTube instance, even a single request seems to be too heavy for them. So if that server does not respond to my request, I usually wait for an hour or so before refreshing the page.
The problem is these are constant army hordes / datacentres. You have one tool. Sending a few requests from your device wouldn’t even dent a raspberry pi, nevermind a beefier server
I think the intention of traffic is also important. Your tool is so you can consume the content freely provided by the website. Their tool is so they can profit off of the work on the website.
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But html is machine-readable and that absolutely is the point!
Never forget what they stole from us.
So search engines shouldn’t exist? This is absurdly simplistic.