espn.com

espn.com robots.txt's asks to block certain paths from being crawled. We would advise not to scrape them.

The robots.txt file is a way for website owners to indicate to web bots which pages or sections of the site should not be accessed or indexed, allowing them to set their scraping tolerance.

The terms of service of a website can indicate whether scraping is legal or not by specifing bot acceptable usage. Reviewing certain keywords and phrases before scraping is important to ensure compliance with the website's policies.

It's crucial to look out for words such as "retrieval application" or "user generated content" in the terms of service. It's recommended to consult with a lawyer before scraping to ensure compliance with legal requirements.

Note that this isn't legal advice and may also be an incorrect indication, check with your lawyer before.

If a website has strong bot protections in place, it can make it difficult or even impossible for a scraping script to access the site and collect data.This could include things like CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, and user-agent blocking.

This is why it's important to take bot protections into account when scraping a website. It's important to be aware of these protections and make sure that the scraping process is done in a legal and ethical way.

When scraping a website, ergonomics refers to the ease and efficiency of the process. There are a couple of indicators that can determine the ergonomics of scraping a website.

Static site generators, such as Jekyll or Hugo, can greatly improve the ergonomics of scraping a website by generating a static version of its content (no need to run a headless browser). This makes it easier to scrape.

A search function on a website can make scraping easier. It can help you find pages and content that you might have missed otherwise. And it can give you an idea of the site's structure and organization, which can be helpful when scraping. So before you start, check if the website has a search function and use it to your advantage. Some 3rd-party search providers actually make it difficult to use for scraping (like Algolia), home-made search is usually want you want to look for.

Here we specifiy all the technical aspects of scraping. What headers we saw and what they tell us. What requests were blocked and how you can detect them when you are scraping.