In recent news, Google has put forth a proposal known as the "Web Environment Integrity Explainer", authored by four of its engineers. On the surface, it
It would stop beneficial bots like the ones I create¹ as a small-time hobbyist because the little guy does not have the resources for this arms race. You may be right when it comes to large-scale scraping ops that are done by a business (e.g. scraping RyanAir or Southwest airlines so an airfare consolidation site can show more fares).
① e.g. I wrote a bot that scraped the real estate market sites, scraped the public transport sites, and found me a house with the shortest public transport commute.
It was coded 8 years ago in Tcl¹ for a one-off project in Belgium. Would you really be interested?
The APIs would have changed dramatically by now & some of the real estate sites no longer exist. Some of the sites brought in CAPTCHAs. It was coded to use Tor & the public transport site has become Tor-hostile and also changed their API. It’s also very user unfriendly… a collection of scripts & variety of hacks because I was my only user.
I didn’t publish the code at the time because I worried that it would trigger the target sites to become bot-hostile.
① Also note that I use #Tcl for personal use but I resist publishing any Tcl code because I would rather not promote the Tcl language. Why? Because the Tcl folks have jailed a large portion of their docs in Cloudflare’s walled garden. I believe programming language docs should be openly public.
I wouldn’t be trying to use or adapt it; it was more of an intellectual curiosity. I haven’t written scrapers or used Tcl, so, yeah, I would be interested to take a peek :-)
I’d like to write something similar, but I’d probably use Lisp or Python.
But the limitation of using #Selenium is a big one. Being forced to work in java, forced to use the resource hog of a modern gui browser, forced to reveal more browserprint info, being browser-dependent, etc. Selenium is my last choice when desperation is sufficiently high.
It would stop beneficial bots like the ones I create¹ as a small-time hobbyist because the little guy does not have the resources for this arms race. You may be right when it comes to large-scale scraping ops that are done by a business (e.g. scraping RyanAir or Southwest airlines so an airfare consolidation site can show more fares).
① e.g. I wrote a bot that scraped the real estate market sites, scraped the public transport sites, and found me a house with the shortest public transport commute.
Are you willing to share the source for said bot?
It was coded 8 years ago in Tcl¹ for a one-off project in Belgium. Would you really be interested?
The APIs would have changed dramatically by now & some of the real estate sites no longer exist. Some of the sites brought in CAPTCHAs. It was coded to use Tor & the public transport site has become Tor-hostile and also changed their API. It’s also very user unfriendly… a collection of scripts & variety of hacks because I was my only user.
I didn’t publish the code at the time because I worried that it would trigger the target sites to become bot-hostile.
① Also note that I use #Tcl for personal use but I resist publishing any Tcl code because I would rather not promote the Tcl language. Why? Because the Tcl folks have jailed a large portion of their docs in Cloudflare’s walled garden. I believe programming language docs should be openly public.
I wouldn’t be trying to use or adapt it; it was more of an intellectual curiosity. I haven’t written scrapers or used Tcl, so, yeah, I would be interested to take a peek :-)
I’d like to write something similar, but I’d probably use Lisp or Python.
How would this impact selenium based bots?
Perhaps not at all.
But the limitation of using #Selenium is a big one. Being forced to work in java, forced to use the resource hog of a modern gui browser, forced to reveal more browserprint info, being browser-dependent, etc. Selenium is my last choice when desperation is sufficiently high.