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A SOCKS proxy is an internet protocol that routes network traffic through a third-party server and masks your IP address. It operates at the transport layer, handling any traffic type – TCP, UDP, web, gaming, torrenting, and more – without inspecting or modifying the data. In this blog entry, we’ll cover the ins and outs of SOCKS proxies, including how they work, key benefits, use cases, and how they compare against HTTP proxies.

Web scraping with Linux is more capable than most people expect. Bash may not be the go-to tool for web scraping, but with a handful of pre-installed command-line utilities you can build a working scraper without touching Python or a browser. This guide covers how to make HTTP requests in Linux, parse into HTML and JSON, set up proxy support with Decodo, and build a fully working Bash-based scraper from scratch.

Perplexity is slowly becoming one of the more prominent LLMs in 2026 because it delivers output in a unique way that sets it apart from the rest. When you send a prompt, Perplexity AI will return a direct answer, along with cited sources (URLs and titles), related follow-up questions to that prompt, and supporting images as well. All this information can be worth tracking for businesses that care about their brand visibility, and how Perplexity is representing them and their competitors to a typical user.

Python and JavaScript are 2 languages that dominate web scraping, but for different reasons. The real question isn't which language is "better," but rather what task you're building for. This article compares both languages in terms of libraries, performance, support for dynamic content, and anti-bot strategies, while also showing why the overall architecture matters more than your language choice.

When you need to get cookies in Playwright and reuse them across runs, the key concept is the browser context. Cookies live in the context, not the page. Getting cookies in Playwright starts with the context.cookies() method, and returns every cookie stored in the browser context, which you can save and load from a file later. This guide walks through how to get, save, and load cookies in Playwright.

Headless browsers in Playwright can leak fingerprint signals that anti-bot systems notice. While Playwright is great for automation, its default settings make these signals easy to spot. Stealth plugins help cover these leaks so your scripts look like real user traffic. This guide explains detection methods, how to set up stealth in Python and Node.js, what gets patched, how to test, and the limits and scaling options.

A 502 bad gateway error means a gateway or proxy contacted an upstream server but didn't receive a valid response. The issue usually sits somewhere in the server path, not on your device. This guide explains what 502 means, why it happens, how to diagnose it, and how to fix it as a visitor, developer, or operator.

Rebrowser is an open-source project that patches Playwright and Puppeteer to strip the automation signals that anti-bot systems detect. Its main target is the Runtime.Enable CDP command, which both libraries call by default and which vendors flag as automation. This article explains what the patches change, how to install and run them, and how to pair rebrowser with proxies.

Knowing how to wait for a page to load in Playwright is the difference between a scraper that returns clean data and one that fails silently. In this guide, you'll learn how to handle waiting in Playwright, including how it behaves in a headless browser environment, covering auto-waiting, selectors, network events, timeouts, custom conditions, and error handling across dynamic pages.

Undetected ChromeDriver is a Python library that patches Selenium’s ChromeDriver to avoid bot detection when web scraping. Standard Selenium ChromeDriver is blocked by most protected websites within the first few requests: anti-bot services like Cloudflare, DataDome, and HUMAN (formerly PerimeterX) read automation flags, WebDriver properties, and browser-fingerprint gaps before the first page finishes loading. The undetected_chromedriver library works as a drop-in Selenium WebDriver replacement (swap webdriver.Chrome() for uc.Chrome()) and reduces those signals. But it does not hide your IP address, so this guide also shows how to pair it with residential proxies and behavioral techniques to stay unblocked.

Bing scraping is the automated extraction of rankings, ads, snippets, and search features from Bing's SERPs. Since Microsoft retired all official Bing Search APIs in 2025, scraping and third-party SERP APIs are the main ways to access this data programmatically. This guide covers Python-based approaches using Requests, Beautiful Soup, Playwright, and Decodo's Web Scraping API.

In June 2026, bot traffic vs human traffic flipped for the first time. Cloudflare Radar measured 57.4% of web requests as automated and 42.6% as human. AI tools drove the change. This article breaks down where bots dominate, which countries skew human, and what businesses building or buying AI tools should do about it.

JSON is the format that most web APIs and modern websites use to send their data. This tutorial shows how to scrape JSON data in Python – fetching it, parsing it, modifying it, and exporting clean files. You'll also learn about the tools for messy or oversized responses, and how to get data when sites block you with fingerprinting.

We’re proud to announce that our latest product, Fast Search API, is live today and available for all self-service and Enterprise users. Our new Google SERP API returns only the top organic results or top stories, in clean, structured JSON, with sub-second latency. We built it for teams running AI agents, RAG pipelines, and real-time dashboards that need search data fast, without ads, widgets, or scraping overhead.

Scrapy is an asynchronous Python framework for crawling and extracting data at scale, but it doesn't execute JavaScript on its own. A spider can get a clean 200 response and still return empty selectors on a modern site. This guide covers the rendering options (Splash, Selenium, Playwright, managed APIs) and the cache and concurrency settings that matter once browser rendering comes into play.

Browser fingerprinting allows websites to identify and track users across devices and sessions without relying on cookies. The W3C and major browser vendors flag it as a privacy threat that regulators are actively working to address. BotBrowser is an open-source, privacy-focused Chromium-based browser core designed to maintain a consistent fingerprint across operating systems. This guide covers its features, setup, validation, and practical use cases.

As a Ruby developer, you must have used proxies for multiple applications, including web scraping, API integration, and geo-targeted testing. Without a proxy, every request leaves from the same IP, which is the fastest way to get rate-limited or blocked. In this guide, you'll learn how to configure a Ruby proxy with Net::HTTP and Faraday, add authentication, rotate IPs, and connect Ruby applications to Decodo residential proxies.

Traditional proxies hide your IP, but struggle against anti-bot systems like Cloudflare, DataDome, and Akamai. Webmaster unblockers, also known as Site Unblockers, are managed request layers that take a URL and return rendered HTML. This guide explains how they work, when to pick 1 over a proxy or Web Scraping API, and which 5 tools stand out in 2026.