Recently we discovered a highly protected site — govets.com. Since the number of target brand items of the site was not big (under 3K), I decided to get target data using the handy tools for a fast manual scrape.
Tag: web scraping
Agree, it’s hard to overestimate the importance of information – “Master of information, master of situation”. Nowadays, we have everything to become a “master of situation”. We have all needed tools like spiders and parsers that could scrape various data from websites. Today we will consider scraping the Amazon with a web spider equipped with proxy services.
From eCommerce and market research to competitive analysis and more, web scraping has become an integral part of data collection. And for some, it’s the secret sauce for success.
But with great scraping power comes great responsibility.
Web scraping can result in IP bans and other harsh restrictions. To avoid these issues, many turn to proxies, which act as intermediaries between your requests and the target website. In this article, we’ll explore the top 3 proxy types for web scraping and focus on the key benefits of each proxy. Let’s go!
Recently we’ve got the tricky website, its data being of dynamic nature. Yet we’ve applied the modern day scraping tools to fetch data. We’ve develop an effective Python scraper using Selenium library for browser automation.
About the project
We were asked to have a look at a retailer website.
And our task was to gather data on 210 products’ availability in 945 shops. The scrape resulted in about 200K data entries in a CSV format. Moreover, every line contained information about name, link, brand, store and the availability of a product. Below you can familiarise yourself with a small data sample we were able to gather.
Categories
Web Scraping: 5 pros and cons
Web scraping, also known as data mining or web harvesting, is the process of extracting data from websites automatically. The extracted data can be used for various purposes, such as market research, price monitoring, sentiment analysis, and many more. However, web scraping has both advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we will discuss the five main pros and cons of web scraping.
Categories
AirTable scrape challenge
The problem is that data are loaded highly dynamically. HTML contains only the information that you currently see on the browser screen.
If there are a lot of records then it is difficult to collect such a table. One of the possible ways is to calculate the size of the screen and rows in the table. Then using the browser automation and use to make a script that will scroll through it bit by bit and collect data.
Is there any other feasible way to get data of a table? For example there is a HTTP requests coding way to get dynamic data.
JS infinite scroll does not work for AirTable either.
Please comment down here if having some tips, hints.
We’ve already stated some Tips and Tricks of scraping business directories or data aggregators sites. Yet recently someone has asked us to do aggregators’ scraping in the context of Google Sheets and/or MS Excel.
Recently we’ve performed the Yelp business directory scrape for acquiring high quality B2B leads (company + CEO info). This forced us to apply many techniques like proxying, external company site scrape, email verification and more.
| Service | Residential | Cost/month | Traffic/month | $ per GB | Rotating | IP whitelisting | Performance and more | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MarsProxies |  | N/A | N/A | 3.5 | yes | yes | 500K+ IPs, 190+ locations Test results | SOCKS5 supported Proxy grey zone restrictions |
| Oxylabs.io | | N/A | 25 GB | 9 - 12 "pay-as-you-go" - 15 | yes | yes | 100M+ IPs, 192 countries - 30K requests - 1.3 GB of data - 5K pages crawled | Not allowing to scrape some of grey zone targets, incl. Linkedin. |
| Smartproxy | | Link to the price page | N/A | 5.2 - 7 "pay-as-you-go" - 8.5 | yes | yes | 65M+ IPs, 195+ countries | Free Trial Not allowing to scrape some of grey zone targets, incl. Linkedin. |
| Infatica.io | | N/A | N/A | 3 - 6.5 "pay-as-you-go" - 8 | yes | yes | Over 95% success *Bans from Cloudflare are also few, less than 5%. | Black list of sites —> proxies do not work with those.
|
| Mango Proxy | | N/A | 1-50 GB | 3-8 "pay-as-you-go" - 8 | yes | yes | 90M+ IPs, 240+ countries |  |
| IPRoyal | | N/A | N/A | $4.55 | yes | yes | 32M+ IPs, 195 countries | Not allowing to scrape some of grey zone targets, incl. Facebook. List of bloked sites. |
| Rainproxy.io | yes | $ 4 | from 1 GB | 4 | yes | |||
| BrightData | yes | 15 | ||||||
| ScrapeOps Proxy Aggregator | yes | API Credits per month | N/A | N/A | yes | Allows multithreading, the service provides browsers at its servers. It allows to run N [cloud] browsers from a local machine. The number of threads depends on the subscription: min 5 threads. | The All-In-One Proxy API that allows to use over 20+ proxy providers from a single API | |
| Lunaproxy.com | yes | from $15 | x Gb per 90 days | 0.85 - 5 | Each plan allows certain traffic amount for 90 days limit. | |||
| LiveProxies.io | yes | from $45 | 4-50 GB | 5 - 12 | yes | yes | Eg. 200 IPs with 4 GB for $70.00, for 30 days limit. | |
| Charity Engine -docs | yes | - | - | starting from 3.6 Additionally: CPU computing - from $0.01 per avg CPU core-hour - from $0.10 per GPU-hour - source. | failed to connect so far | |||
| proxy-sale.com | yes | from $17 | N/A | 3 - 6 "pay-as-you-go" - 7 | yes | yes | 10M+ IPs, 210+ countries | 30 days limit for a single proxy batch |
| Tabproxy.com | yes | from $15 | N/A | 0.8 - 3 (lowest price is for a chunk of 1000 GB) | yes | yes | 200M+ IPs, 195 countries | ,30-180 days limit for a single proxy batch (eg. 5 GB) |
| proxy-seller.com | yes | N/A | N/A | 4.5 - 6 "pay-as-you-go" - 7 | yes | yes | 15M+ IPs, 220 countries | - Generation up to 1000 proxy ports in each proxy list - HTTP / Socks5 support - One will be able to generate an infinite number of proxies by assigning unique parameters to each list |
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.
