If you crawl at 1Hz per crawled IP, no reasonable server would suffer from this. It's the few bad apples (impatient people who don't rate limit) who ruin the internet for both users and hosters alike. And then there's Google.
The residential proxies are not needed, if you behave. My take is that you want to scrape stuff that site owners do not want to give you and you don't want to be told no or perhaps pay a license. That is the only case where I can see you needing a residential proxies.
I'm starting to think that somee users in hackernews do not 'behave' or at least they think they do not 'behave' and provide an alibi for those that do not 'behave'.
That the hacker in hackernews does not attract just hackers as in 'hacking together features' but also hackers as in 'illegitimately gaining access to servers/data'
As far as I can tell, as a hacker that hacks features together, resi proxies are something the enemy uses. Whenever I boot up a server and get 1000 log in requests per second and requests for commonly exploited files from russian and chinese IPs, those come from resi IPs no doubt. There's 2 sides to this match, no more.
That said, I support Google working to shut these networks down, since they are almost universally bad.
It’s just a shame that there’s no where to go for legitimate crawling activities.
Think about why that might be. I'm sorry, if you legitimately need to crawl the net, and do so from a cloud provide, your industry screwed you over with bad behaviour. Go get hosting with a company that cares about who their customers are, you're hanging out with a bad crowd.
This differs obviously, but having an ASN in our case means that we can deal you, contact you and assume that you're better than random bot number 817.
There are lots of healthy / productive businesses in the cloud and lots of scumbags, just like any enterprise.
I still have no idea about your point, by the way.
Hiding behind a residential proxy and using random user agents? Gross. Learn what consent is.
You're thinking about the case of big AI companies crawling your blog. I'm talking about a small startup trying to do traditional indexing and needing to run from residential proxy to make it work.
I actually do let quite a few known, "good" scrapers scrape my stuff. They identify themselves, they make it clear what they do, and they respect conventions like robots.txt.
These residential proxies have been abused by scrapers that use random legit-looking user agents and absolutely hammer websites. What is it with these scrapers just not understanding consent? It's gross.
Rules For Thee but Not for Me
because google (and the couple of other search engines) provide enough value that offset the crawler's resource consumption.
implying “robots.txt explicitly says i can’t scrape their site, well i want that data, so im directing my bot to take it anyway.”
Do you think this is such a horrible thing to scrape? I can't do it manually since there are few hundred locations. I could write some python script which uses playwrite to scrape things using my desktop browser in order to avoid CloudFlare. Or, which I am much more familiar with, I could write a python script that uses BeautifulSoup to extract all the relevant locations once for me. I would have been perfectly happy fetching 1 page/sec or even 1 page/2 seconds and would still be done within 20 minutes if only there was no anti-scraping protection.
Scraping is a perfectly legal activity, after all. Except thanks to overly-eager scraping bots and clueless/malicious people who run them there's very little chance for anyone trying to compete with Google or even do small scale scraping to make their life and life of local art enthusiasts easier. Google owns search. Google IS search and no competition is allowed, it seems.
Why is hammering the everloving fuck out of their website okay?
They made the data available on the website already, there's no reason to contact them when you can just load it from their website.
1 Hz is 86400 hits per day, or 600k hits per week. That's just one crawler.
Just checked my access log... 958k hits in a week from 622k unique addresses.
95% is fetching random links from u-boot repository that I host, which is completely random. I blocked all of the GCP/AWS/Alibaba and of course Azure cloud IP ranges.
It's almost all now just comming of a "residential" and "mobile" IP address space from completely random places all around the world. I'm pretty sure my u-boot fork is not that popular. :-D
Every request is a new IP address, and available IP space of the crawler(s) is millions of addresses.
I don't host a popular repo. I host a bot attraction.
I used Anubis and a cookie redirect to cut the load on my Forgejo server by around 3 orders of magnitude: https://honeypot.net/2025/12/22/i-read-yann-espositos-blog.h...
I guess the bots are all spoofing consumer browser UAs and just the slightest friction outside of well-known tooling will deter them completely.
A whitelist would be needed for sites where getting all the pages make sense. And probably in addition to the 1Hz, an additional limit of 1k/day would be needed.
I can see now why Google has not much solid competition (Yandex/Baidu arguably don't compete due to network segmentation).
Scraping reliably is hard, and the chance of kicking Google off their throne may be even further reduced due to AI crawler abuse.
PS 958k hits is a lot! Even if your pages were a tiny 7.8k each (HN front page minus assets), that would be about 7G of data (about 4.6 Bee Movies in 720p h256).
if someone is abusing my site, and i block them in an attempt to stop that abuse, do we think that they are correct to tell me it doesn’t matter what i think and to use any methods they want to keep abusing it?
that seems wrong to me.