Semalt: Famous Unscrapable Websites

To scrape the data you want manually, you need to have excellent programming skills. Alternatively, you can use a range of web data extraction tools that aim to read, structure and scrape data in a specific format. However, some websites are unscrapable, which means they either use anti-scraping techniques or change their markup regularly. For example, LinkedIn, Alibaba and Facebook require login details, offer to enter CAPTCHA, and block IP addresses to ensure their users' protection and privacy.

1. Facebook:

Facebook is one of the most famous social networking websites that has over 20 million active users all over the world. There are a large number of applications and data scraping programs that aim to extract individual information from Facebook. Unfortunately, most tools do not provide us accurate and readable data. Facebook has made it difficult for spammers and hackers to collect information about its users. It can be obtained only with the help of an HTML parser such as Python, but most of the webmasters and freelancers don't even know the basics of Python. Most recently, a Facebook scraper was launched to extract vital information from this social networking website. With a Facebook scraper, you can only collect names and email addresses of the Facebook users. But if you want to collect in-depth data, you cannot use this tool or any other similar scraper.

2. LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is another social networking website that is impossible to scrape. However, you can partially extract data from a few web pages, but most of the information is inaccessible. You can only scrape information from a LinkedIn public profile using Import.io or Kimono Labs. Marketers cannot take advantage of scraping services because of LinkedIn's strong safety measures. However, they have started using Lead Extractor, which helps scrape public profiles. This tool can scrape profile links, names, and email addresses only. But if you want to get Skype ID, Yahoo Messenger ID, complete address, and Twitter ID of a user, LinkedIn will not let you do that.

3. Alibaba:

Alibaba is a technology conglomerate that provides business-to-consumer services online. Unfortunately, there is no way to scrape data from this website. Unlike Amazon and eBay, Alibaba has made it difficult for its users to extract information about its products, images, descriptions, and prices. In 2015, a number of tools that can scrape data from Alibaba with ease were introduced to the public. Most of the tools are paid and do not come up the expectations of startups. Alibaba operates an extensive array of businesses all over the world and connects buyers with suppliers. Meanwhile, it ensures their privacy and does not let anyone scrape data. As of October 2017, Alibaba has more than 500 million monthly active users across its platform. Alibaba even outperformed major cloud players such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in cloud revenue growth. It has implemented best strategies to ensure its suppliers' privacy and blocks all suspicious IP addresses within seconds.