Tech Blog

  Web scraping or web tracking retrieves data from a third-party website by downloading and analyzing the HTML code to extract the data you want. With a scraping software, you can access the web directly via the hypertext transfer protocol or your usual web browser. Scraping, especially on a mass scale, is usually done with automated software such as a robot or web crawler. These tools capture the data you need and store it in a local file on your computer or in a tabular database, such as a spreadsheet or a table. Web scraping is super powerful for: E-commerce price monitoring News aggregation Lead generation SEO (Search engine result page monitoring) Bank account aggregation (such as Mint in the US or Banking in Europe) Why Proxies are important for Web Scraping: 1.       By using multiple proxy servers, you can reduce the chances of getting blocked by the site and extract data more efficiently. 2.  ...

  Today, online data mining is a must. Some public data resources let you access their data via an API, but others try to keep it to themselves. Furthermore, many businesses take active precautions to fence their public data off. In this climate,  the best way to access public data is a practice called screen scraping . It is a process when a user agent  accesses a site and collects important data automatically . Screen scraping is almost always used at a huge scale to gather a comprehensive database. To make scraping really scalable and undetectable,  web scrapers need a large proxy list or proxy server . It makes each scraping action look unique and not give away their real intentions. Smartproxy is one of the largest residential web scraping proxy networks, that lets scrapers rotate IPs for every request.   Scraper site API is one of the best web scraping API   that handles proxy rotation, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can...

  Web scraping or web harvesting is a technique used to extract requirement relevant and large amounts of data from websites. This information can be stored locally on your computer in the form of spreadsheets. This can be very insightful for a business to plan its marketing strategy as per the analysis of the data obtained. Web scraping has enabled businesses to innovate at the speed of light, providing them real-time access to data from the world wide web. So if you’re an e-commerce company and you are looking for data, having a web scraping application will help you download hundreds of pages of useful data on competitor websites, without having to deal with the pain of doing it manually. Why Is Web Scraping so Beneficial? Web Scraping kills the manual monotony of data extraction and overcomes the hurdles of the process. For example, there are websites that have data that you cannot copy and paste. This is where web scraping comes into play by helping y...

  Web Scraper or spider becomes more and more popular in data science. This auto-technique can help us retrieve loads of customized data from the Web or database. However, the major issue is that requesting too many pages in too short a period of time by a single IP address can be easily traced by the website, thus being blocked by the target website. To limit the chances of getting blocked, we should try to avoid scraping a website with a single IP Address. And normally, we use proxy servers which include discrete proxy IP addresses whenever the requests are routed over the crawling server. Concerned about the proxy server, the reliability of the proxy should always come first to our mind. Actually, there are around 1000 places to buy proxies and some unreliable proxies would go too fast, which might cause themselves to get blocked. There are also other approaches that can be more related to out-sourcing the IP rotation(think pro...

  Before we discuss what a proxy is we first need to understand what an IP address is and how they work. An IP address is a numerical address assigned to every device that connects to an Internet Protocol network like the internet, giving each device a unique identity. Most IP addresses look like this: 207.148.1.212 A proxy is a 3rd party server that enables you to route your request through their servers and use their IP address in the process. When using a proxy, the website you are making the request to no longer sees your IP address but the IP address of the proxy, giving you the ability to scrape the web anonymously if you choose. Currently, the world is transitioning from  IPv4  to a newer standard called  IPv6 . This newer version will allow for the creation of more IP addresses. However, in the proxy business  IPv6  are still not a big thing so most IPs still use the  IPv4  standard. When scraping a website, we recommend tha...

  The idea is not only to talk about the different features they offer, but also to test the reliability with a real world test. We will look and  compare the response times, errors and success rates  on popular websites like  Google and Amazon . There is a  proxy type  to match any specific needs you might have, but you can always start with a free proxy server. This is especially true if you want to use it as a proxy scraper. A free proxy server is a proxy you can connect to without needing special credentials and there are plenty online to choose from. The most important thing you need to consider is the  source of the proxy . Since proxies take your information and re-route it through a different IP address, they still have access to any internet requests you make. While there are a lot of reputable free proxies available for web scraping, there are just as many proxies that are hosted by  hackers or government agencies . This is still a...