Hasn’t worked on most sites in a long time. The obscuring is now done on the server side so the text never gets to the browser. Otherwise it used to be easy to just use the developer console or uBlock to just remove the components that concealed the text or prevent the browser refreshing to prevent the concealing.
I can’t recall which right now, but there are ones that manage to scrape the entire content by spoofing the Google crawler.
Since websites want to maximise their SEO, they must provide the raw content to be indexed better
Often the content is available without masking for a very short time so scrapers can access them or similar tricks to allow them access immediately after posting. But that requires that you hit the server immediately after the story is posted and there is no masking at all usually in those cases. That’s how things like archive.is get a copy for example. But none of that is client/browser side anymore, at least on the major sites. Otherwise it’s easy to defeat if the content is already provided to the browser and just masked with JavaScript or something that runs locally and can be blocked.
Hasn’t worked on most sites in a long time. The obscuring is now done on the server side so the text never gets to the browser. Otherwise it used to be easy to just use the developer console or uBlock to just remove the components that concealed the text or prevent the browser refreshing to prevent the concealing.
I can’t recall which right now, but there are ones that manage to scrape the entire content by spoofing the Google crawler.
Since websites want to maximise their SEO, they must provide the raw content to be indexed better
Often the content is available without masking for a very short time so scrapers can access them or similar tricks to allow them access immediately after posting. But that requires that you hit the server immediately after the story is posted and there is no masking at all usually in those cases. That’s how things like archive.is get a copy for example. But none of that is client/browser side anymore, at least on the major sites. Otherwise it’s easy to defeat if the content is already provided to the browser and just masked with JavaScript or something that runs locally and can be blocked.