Web scraping has evolved significantly. Here is the current landscape:

Tools:

• BeautifulSoup + requests: Best for simple, static pages
• Playwright: Best for JavaScript-heavy sites and automation
• Scrapy: Best for large-scale projects with scheduling
• Firecrawl: Best for converting websites to LLM-ready markdown

Techniques:

• Respect robots.txt
• Implement rate limiting (1 request per second minimum)
• Use rotating User-Agents
• Handle CAPTCHAs gracefully (do not bypass, use services if needed)

Ethics:

• Do not scrape personal data
• Do not overload servers
• Check terms of service
• Give attribution when publishing scraped data