Websites nowadays are no longer as easy to extract data from as before because the structure of websites now is very different from the past - they don’t have clearly defined sections for quick analysis, and a large part is because some medium and large websites have implemented measures to prevent data crawling from their sites.
However, certainly, it’s impossible to avoid this completely. Part of the reason is also because website creators don’t completely want to protect their websites from being crawled 100%. Some reasons are outlined as follows:
There’s no way to completely prevent web scraping, so many people understand this and don’t try too hard to prevent it: basically, except for shutting down the server, as long as your website is still public on the internet and accessible to many people, you won’t be able to prevent being scraped.
Impact on user experience: websites can use a very common method to prevent bots, which is using captcha - forcing users to pass captcha every time they visit the site. This certainly reduces a large number of bots visiting the site but also greatly affects users. Think about how you would feel if a website forced you to enter captcha too many times - personally, I would close it immediately.
Protection costs a lot: using third-party services like Cloudflare to protect your website from bots will cost a considerable fee that not everyone is willing to pay. And if you don’t use third-party services, you have to spend a relatively large amount of money to build these features and then test them.
Impact on search ranking: as I mentioned, most website owners don’t like us scraping their data, but there’s one bot they extremely like and even have to clear the way for - Google Search Engine bots (and other Search Engines). So if you use too many blocking techniques that prevent Google from getting your website data, then certainly your website can’t rank high.
Legal issues: I don’t want to talk too much about this issue, I just want to make a general point that like many other activities on the Internet, there’s no simple answer about the legal aspects of crawling data from websites.
Reference: https://finddatalab.com/
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