[HN Gopher] Abusing Ahrefs backlink checker
___________________________________________________________________
Abusing Ahrefs backlink checker
Author : rl1987
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-06-27 11:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.trickster.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.trickster.dev)
| mdaniel wrote:
| I wonder if there's some architectural reason for using
| `["Status", {}]` shapes instead of a more traditional response
| shape [ "Ok", {
| "data": {
|
| It seems to place a lot of the error detection burden upon the
| caller, since the response can be empty `[]`, it can have a
| status without a body (which, I guess may be fine for their api?)
| `["OkHarHar"]`, and then the usual promises-made-promises-kept of
| the expected keys being in the `response[1]` location. One can
| see this heartache sort of play out in the subsequent python code
| in the blog post although they just return None in the simple
| `len() != 2` case
| akiselev wrote:
| With pattern matching it'd look like: match
| (response) { ["Ok", { data }] => { ... },
| ["Error", { error }] => { ...handle known error... }
| _ => { ...handle unknown error... }, }
|
| It could also just be auto-generated
| serialization/deserialization code like in Rust.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| The main point of this article is that you can pay humans to
| solve CAPTCHAs, via a company which acts as middle-man.
|
| The company in question (Kolotibablo) has a website at
| https://kolostories.com/ which argues that paid CAPTCHA-solving
| is a good economic option for the people who do it. Maybe it is?
| I can't decide.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| I wonder if it's cheaper to just pay for a subscription and get
| access to their API - given that solving captcha cost $1-2.
| slig wrote:
| $1 - $2 per _thousand_ queries.
| smarx007 wrote:
| Looks like API access is only available at $1k/mo.:
| https://ahrefs.com/pricing
| moneywoes wrote:
| Hmm is this still cheaper than purchasing the service?
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| You can make the text a bit more legible with this userstyle:
| body { --fg: white; font-family: sans-
| serif; }
| petercooper wrote:
| I guess that explains why Turnstile has been as useful as an
| ashtray on a motorbike for stopping automated signups for me.
| skilled wrote:
| Ahrefs was using recaptcha until recently, I wonder if that was
| abused in the same way or whatever the reason for them switching
| up was.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Recaptcha could also be bypassed in the same way FWIW.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Is there any captcha that can't? I presume LinkedIn captcha
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| That's Arkose Labs and 2Captcha, Anti-captcha and Nopecha
| have bypasses for them.
| marban wrote:
| Do Ahrefs et al operate their own crawling infrastructure or is
| there another third party vendor for this?
| skilled wrote:
| They do. And they have their own search engine, too - Yep.com
|
| They have some info on their Data[0] page.
|
| I always saw them as - if Google Search had a public back-end
| UI, then Ahrefs would be it.
|
| [0]: https://ahrefs.com/big-data
| smarx007 wrote:
| They do: https://ocaml.org/success-stories/peta-byte-scale-web-
| crawle...
| gkbrk wrote:
| Ahrefs operates their own crawler, and gets really valuable
| data from it.
|
| Source: My server logs.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-28 23:03 UTC)