webscraping.pro
We recently applied Sequentum Cloud to a highly protected scrape target and got quite successful results. An initial Agent run had some errors, failing data capture of some of URLs. After a support consultation we were pointed to a built-in feature of Sequentum Cloud to rerun Agent to gather missing data.
In the modern web 2.0 the sites that have valuable data (eg. business directories, data aggregators, social networks and more) implement aggressive blocking measures, which can cause major extraction difficulties. How can modern scraping tools (eg. Sequentum Cloud) still be able to fetch data of actively protected sites?
Sequentum is a closed source point and click scraping platform that integrates everything we need to bypass anti-bot services, including management of browsers, device fingerprints, TSL fingerprints, IP rotation, user agents, and more. Sequentum has had its own custom scraping browser for more than a decade, and as one of the most mature solutions on the market, they are able to support atomic level customization for each request and workflow step. As such, Sequentum Cloud is an out-of-the-box advanced scraping platform with no upfront requirement to stand up infrastructure, software, or proxies. It also has a very responsive support team, which can be useful in coming up to speed on one’s approach and is quite unique in the scraping industry. In this test, we were able to configure a site with very aggressive blocking and, with some refinement of error detection and retry logic, were able to get some of the most protected data consistently over time.
For this test, we pointed their tool at a major brand on Zoro.com, a site with aggressive blocking. Initial attempts yielded 32K records which was 94% of the estimated 34K entries. We worked with support to understand the ways to customize the advanced error detection and retry logic included in the Sequentum platform to the behavior of the Zoro.com site and was able to get 100% of the data. In this article we are sharing what we have learned.
The overall test results of Sequentum Cloud and Oxylabs API (shared in a post) might be summarized in the following comparison table.
| Success rate | Avg. seconds per page | Estimated cost | Rating | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sequentum Cloud Agent | 100% | 0,4 (provided 10 browsers) | $12 ($3.75 per 1GB traffic of res. proxy) |  |
| Oxylabs' API | 90% | 11 | ~$60 ($2 per 1000 requests) |  |
The preconfigured API [of Oxylabs] is already built [and maintained] for an end user. Sequentum Cloud Platform is rather an open tool, and agents can be customized in a myriad of ways. Hence it can take longer to build a working agent [compared to a ready-API] but for the most part a custom agent is the better way to apply in an industrial scale for one’s custom use case.
Sharing an informative article by Sarah McKenna (CEO of Sequentum & Forbes Technology Council Member), The Importance Of Transparency And Trust In Data And Generative AI. It includes factors for responsible data collection (aka scraping) and web data usefulness for AI post processing. She touches on security, adherence to regulatory requirements, bias prevention, governance, auditability, vendor evaluation and more.
In the age of data-driven decision-making, the quality of your outcomes depends on the quality of the underlying data. Companies of all sizes seek to harness the power of data, tailored to their specific needs, to understand the market, pricing, opportunities, etc. In this data-rich environment, using generic or unreliable data not only has the intangible costs that prevent companies from achieving their full potential, it has real tangible costs as well.
Recently I was given a bunch of sites to scrape, most of them being simple e-commerce. I decided to try Zyte AI powered spiders. To utilize it, I had to apply for a Zyte API subscription and access to Scrapy Cloud. Zyte AI proved to be a good choice for the fast data extraction & delivery thru spiders that are Scrapy Spiders. Below you can see my experience and the results.
I have done another “experience” post on the Zyte platform usage.
I’ve described my initial experience with Zyte AI spiders leveraging Zype API and Scrapy Cloud Units. You might find it here. Now I’d share more sobering report of what happened with the data aggregator scrape.
Recently we encountered a new powerful scraping service called Web Scraper IDE [of Bright Data]. The life-test and thorough drill-in are coming soon. Yet now we want to highlight its main features that has badly (in positive sense, strongly) impressed us.
Often, you want to detect changes on some eBay offerings or get notified of the latest items of interest from craigslist in your area. Or, you want to monitor updates on a website (your competitor’s, for example) where no RSS feed is available. How would you do it, by visiting it over and over again? No, now there are handy tools for website change monitoring. We’ve evaluated some tools and would like to recommend the most useful ones that will make your monitoring job easy. Those tools nicely complement the web scraping software, service and plugins.
Dexi.io is a powerful scraping suite (SaaS). This cloud scraping service provides development, hosting and scheduling tools. The suite might be compared with Mozenda for making web scraping projects and running them in clouds for user convenience. Yet it includes the API, each scraper being a JSON definition similar to other services like Import.io and ParseHub.
Today I want to share my experience with Dexi Pipes. Pipes is a new kind of robot introduced by Dexi.io to integrate web data extraction and web data processing into a single seamless workflow. The main focus of the testing is to show how Dexi might leverage multi-threaded jobs for extraction of data from a retail website.
NB Pipes robots are available starting from PROFESSIONAL plans.
Scrapinghub is the developer-focused web scraping platform. It provides web scraping tools and services to extract structured information from online sources. The Scrapinghub platform also offers several useful services to collect organized data from the internet. Scrapinghub has four major tools – Scrapy Cloud, Crawlera, and Splash. We’ve decided to try the service. In this post we’ll review its main functionality and also share our experience with Scrapinghub.