Who are running these bots? I presume developers at all of the frontier labs know (or at least would know to look for) Wikipedia has bulk APIs for automated access. Unnecessary scraping increases their workload/costs too, so why in 2026 is this still a problem?
Black market and gray market data. All the firms want data. All the other firms want data. The banks want data. The other criminals also want data for their crimes and schemes. Oh insurance companies, and the ATS systems. Everybody wants as much data as they can get and they don't care how they get it.
> Read the Docs, a non-profit that hosts documentation for open-source software, who watched a single crawler download 73 terabytes of zipped HTML in one month, costing it over $5,000 in bandwidth
From the article.
Not the same site, but an example of the same issue.
It would not make any difference.
Indeed, the article mentions Wikipedia experiencing similar scraping pains, even though they already DO have bulk data available.
Who are running these bots? I presume developers at all of the frontier labs know (or at least would know to look for) Wikipedia has bulk APIs for automated access. Unnecessary scraping increases their workload/costs too, so why in 2026 is this still a problem?
Black market and gray market data. All the firms want data. All the other firms want data. The banks want data. The other criminals also want data for their crimes and schemes. Oh insurance companies, and the ATS systems. Everybody wants as much data as they can get and they don't care how they get it.
This data selling also happens with leaks of all kinds like medical data, often to current or future employers, health insurance companies, etc.
> Read the Docs, a non-profit that hosts documentation for open-source software, who watched a single crawler download 73 terabytes of zipped HTML in one month, costing it over $5,000 in bandwidth
From the article.
Not the same site, but an example of the same issue.