What to do if the selenium crawler is detected?

When using Selenium for automated web crawling, it is often detected and blocked by the target website. This is usually because Selenium's automation features are more obvious and can be easily identified by the website's anti-crawler mechanism. This article will explore in depth how to deal with the problem of Selenium crawler being detected, including methods such as hiding automation features and using proxy IPs, and provide specific code examples. At the same time, 98IP proxy will be briefly mentioned as one of the solutions.

I. Reasons for Selenium crawlers being detected

1.1 Obvious automation features

Selenium's default browser behavior is significantly different from manual user operations, such as specific fields in the request header, fixed browser window size, uniform operation speed, etc., which may be used by websites to identify automated scripts.

1.2 Frequent request frequency

Crawlers usually send requests at a frequency much higher than normal users, which can also easily alert websites.

1.3 Fixed IP address

If the crawler always sends requests from the same IP address, the IP address will soon be blacklisted by the website.

II. Strategies for dealing with Selenium crawler detection

2.1 Hide automation features

2.1.1 Modify request headers

Through Selenium's webdriver.ChromeOptions() configuration, you can modify the browser's request header to make it closer to normal user requests.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument('--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36')
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)

2.1.2 Randomize browser settings

Use libraries such as webdriver_manager to automatically manage browser drivers and randomize window size, scrolling behavior, etc. to simulate real user operations.

from selenium.webdriver.common.window import Window
import random

# Randomise window size
window_sizes = [(1024, 768), (1280, 800), (1366, 768), (1920, 1080)]
driver.set_window_size(random.choice(window_sizes)[0], random.choice(window_sizes)[1])

# Simulating user scrolling behaviour
driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")

2.2 Use proxy IPs

Sending requests through proxy IPs can effectively avoid the problem of IP being blocked. High-quality proxy services such as 98IP Proxy provide stable and anonymous IP resources, which is an effective means of dealing with Selenium crawlers being detected.

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from seleniumwire import webdriver  # Note that seleniumwire, not selenium, is used here.
import time

# Configure the proxy IP (take 98IP proxy as an example, you need to replace it with the actual IP and port)
proxy = 'http://username:password@proxy_ip:proxy_port'  # Replaced with authentication information and address provided by the 98IP proxy
chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument(f'--proxy-server={proxy}')

# Starting the Selenium Browser
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(executable_path='path/to/chromedriver'), options=chrome_options)

# Access to the target website (example)
driver.get('http://example.com')
time.sleep(5)  # Waiting for the page to load

# perform other operations...

Note: The above code uses the seleniumwire library instead of selenium because seleniumwire provides more flexible proxy configuration and request interception functions. If you haven't installed seleniumwire yet, you can install it through pip install seleniumwire.

2.3 Controlling request frequency

By introducing random delays and setting reasonable request intervals, the request frequency of the Selenium crawler can be controlled to make it closer to the browsing behavior of normal users.

import time
import random

# Adding random delays between requests
def random_sleep(min_seconds=1, max_seconds=5):
    time.sleep(random.uniform(min_seconds, max_seconds))

# Example: Accessing multiple pages
urls = ['http://example.com/page1', 'http://example.com/page2', 'http://example.com/page3']
for url in urls:
    driver.get(url)
    random_sleep()  # Add a random delay between visits to each page

III. Summary and Outlook

It is a common problem for Selenium crawlers to be detected, but by hiding automation features, using proxy IPs, controlling request frequency, etc., we can effectively reduce the risk of being detected. In particular, using high-quality proxy services such as 98IP Proxy can significantly improve the stability and success rate of crawlers.

In the future, with the continuous advancement of website anti-crawler technology, we also need to continuously update and improve crawler strategies. For example, introducing more complex browser simulation technology, using machine learning to predict and circumvent blocking strategies, etc. are all directions worth exploring.

In short, dealing with the problem of Selenium crawlers being detected requires comprehensive consideration of multiple factors and taking corresponding measures.