![]() The result is lower SEO rankings and a decline in legitimate traffic and ad revenue for those companies whose content is scraped. Scrapers easily steal content and use it for their own purposes. Scraper bots can also gather sensitive information like credit card numbers, which can be used to perpetrate financial fraud.Īnd when it comes to digital content, scraping is the enemy-especially for those businesses that heavily depend on ad revenue to generate income. For online platforms, scraping can also pose a threat to users by gathering user data such as usernames, passwords and email addresses that can then be sold on the dark web for use in phishing attacks and identity theft. Adding insult to injury, malicious actors also use price scraping to ultimately deceive customers through price manipulation and fraud. Leveraging the data they’ve collected through bots, competitors can wage a price war that impacts profit. When competitors enlist scraping bots to gather information on prices, this can be used to undercut these businesses’ strategies. E-tailers invest significant resources to ensure that this is the case. As with any business, when selling a product or service, it is critical to create pricing strategies to ensure that profit margins are balanced with customer demand. To prevent infinite loop, I added a stop when it reaches an arithmetic plural of 20 pages (I will play with this to search for a balance between maximum number of repeats, time it takes and how much the server accepts within a time frame): def scrape(url, header, proxy, page):ĭriver.Why “Hot Ticket” Items Are Only The Beginningīeyond serving as a gateway threat to other types of attacks, scraping bots are also leveraged for competitive intelligence like price scraping. The scrape function is the last step in the program, so it felt right to do the check here Since the url_read function is reading the page number and using this to build the URL, I had this function return the page number too: def url_read():Īnd having the scrape() function check the page too and call mother_function(). Thanks a lot, it does work indeed, ending in an infinite loop and stoppng after reaching the maximum recursion depth It feels odd calling the mother_function from a function which was called by the mother_function, creating a loop. Now this process needs to be repeated for the next page, and since a pagenumber is written to a file in the scrape function (it overwrites the previous page number), is it smart to call the mother_function from the scrapefunction? For example: def scrape(url, header, proxy): I tried this with a few simple functions and print statements in the scrape function, and it seems to work # define function to call preperation functions and call scrape function with arguments from preperation functions I am really stuck and hope someone can coach me (it might take a few more questions to me and explanations from me…).ĭriver.get(URL = url, headers = header, proxies = proxy) How should I repeat this sequence - can I call the function scrape() again by example: while page_number >1:īut then: how to include the other functions here, so that input is generated correctly? Should I define a seperate function for driver.get() and call this before each scrape? ![]() Once that is solved, the next problem presents itself: ![]() I thought I need to return the result, but I cannot get the result out of the function passing it as an argument into a command of another function. I tried defining functions for all of these, but I cannot get(read: don’t know how to, cannot find an undersandable explanation ) the results from the first 3 functions into driver.get(). Scrape() - starting with driver.get (URL=, headers=, proxy= ) and scraping the data of the site and writing it to a df looking if there are more pages and write the pagenumber to a file ‘page.txt’ to have it stored in case of crash or kick by server and be used with the next sequence for scraping the next page (overwrite this page number with the next one in the next iteration and so on) Get_proxies() - resulting in a set of proxies to be used in driver.get (URL, headers, proxy)Ĭreate_header() - resulting in a header with changing user agents to be used in driver.get (URL, headers, proxy) Url_read() - reads a page number from a file ‘page.txt’ and create a URL to be used in driver.get (URL, headers, proxy) All components are working fine seperately, but I am looking to combine them into 1 program, which should be a fundamental thing to do, but I am overlooking something or making it unnecessarily difficult. I wrote components for a webscraper (it started simple, but the website is a nasty one to repeatedly get data from).
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