HTTP vs HTTPS in web scraping ?

by scrapecrow Mar 17, 2023

HTTPS is an encrypted version of the HTTP protocol. It implements end-to-end encryption between the client and the web server.

When web scraping public data we don't care much about the security of the connection though we do care about preventing our scraper from being blocked and HTTPS can play a major role in that.

HTTPS is susceptible to TLS fingerprinting (known as JA3 Fingerprint) which is used to detect web scrapers.

So, scraping HTTPS endpoints is more difficult than scraping HTTP endpoints and if possible, scrapers perform much better when scraping the unsecured HTTP websites.

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