Welcome to Decodo Blog!

The best web proxy depends on the job: a free browser tool works for a quick, one-off visit, while a paid provider is the better choice for logins, regular use, or important business tasks. This guide explains how both options work, where free tools fall short, and how 5 paid providers compare in 2026.

The Lightpanda browser is an open-source headless browser built from scratch for automation. It runs JavaScript pages with less memory than headless Chrome, which matters when you scrape at scale. This guide runs Lightpanda from Python with Playwright and routes it through Decodo residential proxies. Then it tests what still gets blocked on 9 protected sites.

SERP analysis means examining a search engine results page (SERP) for a keyword to understand what ranks, which features appear, and whether your content has a realistic chance of earning visibility and clicks. This guide walks through what SERP analysis is, the six steps to run one, and how to pull SERP data at scale.

Zapier MCP is Zapier's hosted MCP server: one connection that lets an AI agent take actions across 9,000+ apps. It solves reach, not data. Your agent still needs a separate way to get fresh information from the web. This guide covers how Zapier MCP works, how to connect it, and how to pair it with Decodo for live web data.

Keeping up with everything happening around the world can feel overwhelming. With countless news sites competing for your attention using catchy headlines, it’s hard to find what you need among celebrity tea and what the Kardashians were up to this week. Fortunately, there’s a handy tool called Google News that makes it easier to stay informed by helping you filter out the noise and focus on essential information. Let’s explore how you can use Google News together with Python to get the key updates delivered right to you.

A stealth browser is a browser-automation tool that makes an automated session look human to the website. An AI agent can fail mid-session. In our tests, a stealth browser loaded a protected site's landing page and was blocked on page 2. This guide compares CloakBrowser, Camoufox, and undetected-chromedriver on multi-step sessions and shows which fits your agent.

Exa is a neural search API for AI agents. It matches queries to pages by meaning, using embeddings, and returns their contents. It belongs to the retrieval layer, next to search APIs and web data APIs that also crawl and extract. Teams compare Exa alternatives when an agent needs every page of a documentation site or pages behind bot protection.

Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) is an open-source toolkit that lets AI agents investigate how software works, even without access to its original source code. The project has gained significant attention on GitHub in October 2026. In this guide, we'll explore how REA works, what you can analyze with it, and how to get started. We'll also look at an alternative approach when your goal is collecting public web data rather than reverse engineering software.

Poisoned SERPs are complete, normal-looking Google results pages served to automated requests. Most of the keyword's usual sites on them are swapped for others. Nozzle first recorded them on September 20, 2026. Rank trackers store them as real rankings, so a site can "drop" with nothing changed. Learn to tell them from real drops and keep your SERP data accurate.

Tavily is an agentic search API that takes a natural-language query and returns ranked, LLM-ready content instead of raw search result HTML. Many LangChain projects use it by default, and teams compare Tavily alternatives when an agent gives an outdated price or can't read a bot-protected page. This guide shows which alternative fits which use case and how to migrate.

SOCKS5 proxy is a type of proxy that uses SOCKS5 as the baseline protocol instead of the usual HTTP(S). Decodo might be the best overall SOCKS5 proxy pick for its choice of IP sources, session controls, and accessible residential plans. Your best fit depends on the traffic you send – check UDP support, destination ports, and authentication before comparing prices.

AI agents and RAG pipelines need more than single-page scraping. Decodo's Web Data API brings scraping, site discovery, crawling, and web search under one API, giving developers four endpoints and one API key to collect fresh web data at scale, feed it into AI applications, and get started with up to 10K requests on the free plan.

Cursor MCP servers extend the editor beyond local code, connecting APIs, docs, databases, and design tools. Each server used to eat tokens until Cursor's January 2026 dynamic context discovery update cut total agent tokens by 46.9% in runs that called an MCP tool. This guide covers 10 of the best MCP servers for Cursor, with config for each.

Ever wished you could make the web work for you? JavaScript web scraping allows you to gather valuable information from websites in an automated way, unlocking insights that would be difficult to collect manually. In this guide, you'll learn the key tools, techniques, and best practices to scrape data efficiently, whether you're a beginner or a developer looking to streamline data collection.

ASOS customers found an unwelcome alert on their phones on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. A push notification titled "ASOS HACKED," sent through the official app, claimed attackers had "fully compromised" the retailer's Snowflake instance and threatened a leak unless ASOS made contact via Telegram. ASOS hasn't confirmed the incident, and the claims remain unverified.

Puppeteer and Playwright are Node-based browser automation libraries that drive a real Chromium, Firefox, or WebKit browser through code. Choosing between them is a real architectural decision for any production scraping project. The two libraries share a common origin, with Playwright being built at Microsoft by engineers who previously worked on Puppeteer at Google. Yet they differ in browser coverage, language bindings, and scraping ergonomics. In this guide, we’ll cover their performance, stealth, and proxy integration.

AI agent development tools are platforms for building agents that take a goal, split it into steps, and act on their own, mostly without code. Picking the wrong layer- no-code, low-code, or framework- is the most expensive mistake. Some builders are closing or have closed, so this guide ranks only active ones, compares pricing, and covers the web access every agent needs.

ISP proxies and residential proxies solve the same problem in different ways. ISP proxies rely on ISP-registered IPs hosted in datacenters, pairing static addresses with fast connections, while residential proxies route traffic through real household devices, providing flexible rotation and greater IP diversity. This blog post compares the two on performance, cost, and use cases, then helps you decide which one fits your project.