Glassdoor
Scraping Teardown
Find out everything you need to know to reliably scrape Glassdoor,
including scraping guides, Github Repos, proxy performance and more.
Glassdoor Web Scraping Overview
Glassdoor implements multiple layers of protection to prevent automated data extraction. This section provides an overview of its anti-bot systems and common challenges faced when scraping, along with insights into how these protections work and potential strategies to navigate them.
Scraping Summary
Glassdoor is a website where current and former employees anonymously review companies. It also lists job advertisements and company profiles. From a web scraping perspective, it is somewhat popular due to the valuable job, company, and review data it provides. However, Glassdoor uses moderate to strong anti-scraping systems, making bots detection a challenge. Scrapping Glassdoor can involve multiple approaches like usage of proxies or rotation of user-agents to avoid detection. Parsing data can moderately be challenging as Glassdoor uses dynamic CSS and content is dynamically loaded when scrolling pages. Data extraction can be difficult as some of the content might be behind login and geolocated.
Glassdoor Anti-Bots
Anti-scraping systems used by Glassdoor to prevent web scraping. These systems can make it harder and more expensive to scrape the website but can be bypassed with the right tools and strategies.
Glassdoor Web Scraping Legality
Understand the legal considerations before scraping Glassdoor. Review the website's robots.txt file, terms & conditions, and any past lawsuits to assess the risks. Ensure compliance with applicable laws and minimize the chances of legal action.
Legality Review
Scraping Amazon.com presents legal risks due to strict terms of service and anti-scraping policies. The website's terms explicitly prohibit automated data extraction, and Amazon has a history of taking legal action against scrapers under laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Key risks include potential IP bans, cease-and-desist letters, and legal liability for breaching terms. To stay compliant, scrapers should review the robots.txt file, avoid collecting personal or copyrighted data, respect rate limits, and consider using publicly available APIs where possible.
Glassdoor Robots.txt
Does Glassdoor robot.txt permit web scraping?
Summary
The robots.txt file of Glassdoor mainly contains 'Disallow' directives, specifying paths that web crawlers should not access. This includes paths like
o/index.htm,
oSignInPage.htm, /reviews/, /salaries/, /photos/*. These are crucial areas for web scraping as they contain employer reviews, salary data and office photos. However, there are some conditions. Some directives are specific to certain user agents (bots). For example, while 'rssbot' has full access except for the /salaries/ path and few others, 'rogerbot' is disallowed from /reviews/ and further paths. Other bots like 'twitterbot' are allowed on all paths, indicating that Glassdoor appreciates sharing of employer reviews, salary data and job listings on social platforms. Thus, from a web scraping perspective, the robots.txt indicates that Glassdoor selectively allows crawling, but imposes several restrictions too.
Glassdoor Terms & Conditions
Does Glassdoor Terms & Conditions permit web scraping?
Summary
Glassdoor's Terms of Use explicitly forbid any kind of automated access or usage. For instance, the document states that "You agree not to access (or attempt to access) the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Glassdoor, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate, written agreement with Glassdoor." This language suggests that web scraping, as it would normally require non-interface access, is not allowed.
Moreover, the section titled "Restrictions" mentions that "You agree not to engage in any of the following prohibited activities: [...] (vi) scraping or otherwise using any automatic means (including bots, scrapers, and spiders) to access the Services." Thus, it's clear from the terms that bot usage, scrapers, and any automatic data collection methods, likely including web scraping, is prohibited. Violating these terms could potentially result in unauthorized access attempts being blocked, suspension of Glassdoor accounts, and the pursuit of all available legal remedies.
Glassdoor Lawsuits
Legal Actions Against Scrapers: A history of lawsuits filed by the website owner against scrapers and related entities, highlighting legal disputes, claims, and outcomes.
Lawsuits Summary
Glassdoor has not been involved in any known legal disputes related to web scraping.
Found 0 lawsuits