Dev chains 28 scraping tools into a router reading 96% of sites blind-tested

Careless_Love_3213 · reddit · 2026-10-14

To fix the "HTTP 200 but useless page" problem when agents read the web, the author chained 28 scraping tools into an open-source router, Frankensurf: cheapest tool first, verify the page actually has what you asked for (a search page needs results, a product page needs a price), escalate only on failure.

Blind test on 150 pre-picked sites: Frankensurf (free+paid) read 96.0% correctly, free-only 88.0%, best single tool Zyte 86.0%, Firecrawl 84.7%, Jina Reader 73.3%, plain HTTP 48.7%. In blind-graded search, the free tier beat Firecrawl on 35 of 120 queries vs 5, and with paid sources it matched Exa (4.67 vs 4.66 useful results out of 5).

Key lessons:

Check page content, not status codes — every failure that hurt agents came back as a normal 200 (bot checks, login redirects, unloaded search pages).
No single tool reads the whole web; escalating chain + content checks beat the best single tool by 10 points at 1/4 the cost.
Dumb rules beat an LLM judge — 89.5% vs 88.8% and twice as fast, so the model only steps in when the agent itself flags a bad page.
Benchmarks lie until graded blind — 98.7% on sites tuned against dropped to 71% on unseen sites; an early search eval "tied with Exa" only because the judge used the same rules as the system. The fix: pick test sites before looking at them, keep them away from tuning, grade blind.

Open source (alpha) on GitHub: frankensurf, with the benchmark script, site lists and every raw row.

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Dev chains 28 scraping tools into a router reading 96% of sites blind-tested

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