Web Scraping for Beginners in 2026: A No-BS Guide

You want to scrape a website. You've Googled "web scraping tutorial" and found 50 articles that all start with pip install beautifulsoup4 . Half of them are from 2019 and don't work anymore. Here's what actually works in 2026. The 3 Levels of Web Scraping Every website falls into one of three categories: Level 1: Open data (easy) Some sites want you to access their data. They provide APIs or serve plain HTML with no anti-bot protection. Examples: Hacker News (Firebase API), Bluesky (AT Protocol), Wikipedia, most government sites. import requests # Hacker News - completely open Firebase API response = requests . get ( " https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topstories.json " ) story_ids = response . json ()[: 10 ] for story_id in story_ids : story = requests . get ( f " https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/ { story_id } .json " ). json () print ( f " { story [ ' score ' ] } points: { story [ ' title ' ] } " ) No headers, no cookies, no authentication. Just HTTP GET requests. Level