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I'm trying yo scrape this site: https://www.zocdoc.com/

Frist I tried using request library and got this response from the site: 

b'<html style="height:100%"><head><META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"><meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no"><meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1.0"><meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1"></head><body style="margin:0px;height:100%"><iframe src="/_Incapsula_Resource?CWUDNSAI=20&xinfo=13-8874904-0%200NNN%20RT%281557792003687%20128%29%20q%280%20-1%20-1%20-1%29%20r%280%20-1%29%20B15%284%2c200%2c0%29%20U5&incident_id=787000970007113277-35368596172637725&edet=15&cinfo=04000000" frameborder=0 width="100%" height="100%" marginheight="0px" marginwidth="0px">Request unsuccessful. Incapsula incident ID: 787000970007113277-35368596172637725</iframe></body></html>'

Hence I switched to selenium which usually works. I using this simple code to test it: 

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
driver = webdriver.Chrome("/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromedriver")
url = "https://www.zocdoc.com/"
driver.get(url)

But this is not working either, I'm getting this result:

enter image description here

How can be the site detecting that fast the robot?

Luis Ramon Ramirez Rodriguez
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1 Answers1

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As the posted image suggests, the site is protected behind an Imperva WAF (Web Application Firewall) or a related product.

If you ping the site you'll see that all requests go through addresses related to Imperva.

ping www.zocdoc.com
Pinging ux639.x.incapdns.net [45.60.62.232] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 45.60.62.232: bytes=32 time=46ms TTL=59
Reply from 45.60.62.232: bytes=32 time=47ms TTL=59
Reply from 45.60.62.232: bytes=32 time=46ms TTL=59
Reply from 45.60.62.232: bytes=32 time=46ms TTL=59

As you can see, pinging www.zocdoc.com redirects you through an incapdns.net namespace, which according to WHOIS, is owned by Imperva Inc.

As for how the detection works. I believe that issue has been covered in the following post: Can a website detect when you are using selenium with chromedriver? .

ivcuello
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