webscraping.proI have already written several articles on how to use WebDriver for web scraping, but I have never touched on the topic of changing WebDriver’s IP address. Nevertheless, this topic is quite crucial when you come to web scraping, and here I’d like to show you an example of using proxies with WebDriver in Python (and you can easily convert it into your language API).
It’s very common to use proxy servers for web data extraction. If you want to stay undetected when you scrape a website, you have to change your IP address periodically. Otherwise it is very easy to detect unusual activity by observing a large number of requests from a single IP address. Visual Web Ripper has a built-in support of proxy servers called Private Proxy Switch.
As we mentioned before, it’s often necessary to use proxy server when you gather infromation from the web. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to tune Visual Web Ripper to run the web requests through proxy servers.
HideMyAss proxy service has a wonderful feature called “Scheduled IP Change” that automatically changes your IP address at set time intervals. This may help you greatly if you are trying to scrape a website that may block the IP address you use for scraping. But does this feature work as good as it is stated? Recently we have got the following testimony of one of our visitors:
It’s frequently required to have your actual IP address hidden when doing web scraping or, alternately, to access the website from different counties. That’s why we have anonymizers, also called anonymous proxies. These days, it is possible to find an abundance of proxy software and services. Following is a general summary of the fundamentals of proxy:
As you scrape information from websites, it’s often necessary to keep your real IP hidden, quickly change your IP or simply access a website from a country that differs from your own. All these tasks are achieved by means of proxies, mediators between you and the target website. Though there are plenty of companies offering such services on the market today, in this post I’ll introduce you to CyberGhost, an affordable and nice looking proxy.