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POWill providing APIs help deter screen scraping?
 

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    <p>I have been thinking quite a bit here lately about screen scraping and what a task it can be. So I pose the following question.</p> <p>Would you as a site developer expose simple APIs to prevent users from screen scraping, such as JSON results?</p> <p>These results could then implement caching, and they are much smaller for traffic than the huge amounts of markup that could potentially be downloaded.</p> <p>I am not looking at prevention, but deterring scraping.</p> <hr> <p><strong>Scraping Bandwidth Sample</strong><br /> ((users * (% / 100)) * ((freq * 60) * 24)) * filesize</p> <ul> <li>users: 200,000</li> <li>% of users using utility: 5</li> <li>filesize: 1kb</li> <li>freq: 1 minute</li> </ul> <p>Formula:</p> <p>((users * (% / 100)) * ((freq * 60) * 24)) * filesize</p> <p>10,000 * 1440 * 1</p> <p>14400000kb or 13.73291015625gb</p> <p>Assuming your JSON result is 200 bytes that's now (10,000 * 1440 * 0.2) or 2.74658203125gb a day.</p> <p>That's a change of about 11gb of traffic a day.</p> <hr> <p>My Stack Overflow profile is 96k for reference.</p> <hr> <p>The reason for this question prompted asking for a JSON result from users profiles:<br /> <a href="http://stackoverflow.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/101342-add-json-for-user-information" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://stackoverflow.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/101342-add-json-for-user-information</a></p> <p>I wanted to find out if other developers would expose this type of API, and if it is worth your time to provide these APIs to reduce bandwidth.</p>
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    1. COI'm not sure whether you've considered it in your figures or not, but don't forget that screen scrapers generally don't bother to download images, scripts and style sheets when they scrape a website, so their data usage is likely to be less than that of displaying the same page in a browser.
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