Data Collection

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.

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.

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.

Understanding IPv4 vs. IPv6 is essential as the internet's aging infrastructure strains and legacy IPv4 runs out of room. IPv6 steps in as the long-term solution, offering a virtually limitless address space, built-in security, and efficient routing. This article explores their key differences, core benefits, and the practical challenges of transitioning.

Browser MCP is an MCP server and Chrome extension. It allows applications such as Cursor, Claude Desktop, and VS Code to control a tab that is already open. And it doesn't launch a new browser. Browser MCP attaches to your existing profile, so the agent works inside the sessions you already have. That one design choice decides what Browser MCP is good for. But the same choice stops it from scaling. This guide explains setup, use cases, and safety, and compares Browser MCP with other browser automation servers.

Nitter's shutdown looks final: X Corp sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter and XCancel on August 24, 2026; both went offline within a day, briefly returned September 7, then shut down again September 14-15. Nitter survived one technical lockdown in 2024. This second, legal shutdown closes the last easy, no-account path to X data, and here's what remains.

A mobile proxy routes your web requests through a cellular network. You can use one to check carrier- or region-specific content and see how websites respond to mobile traffic. This guide explains how mobile proxies work and compares the best mobile proxy providers based on coverage, rotation options, pricing, and use cases.

Cloudflare now sits in front of 24.7% of all websites (W3Techs, August 2026), so learning how to bypass Cloudflare is unavoidable if you collect public web data at any scale. The hard part is that it scores you across four layers at once: TLS handshake, HTTP/2 frames, IP reputation, and in-browser JavaScript. Pass three and fail one, and you still get blocked. This guide covers the methods that survived Cloudflare's 2025-2026 detection updates, the ones that quietly stopped working, and how to tell which you actually need.

Cloudflare offers an anti-bot system that protects over 25% of all websites to date (W3Techs, 2026), and can shut your scraper down in seconds. This is where a Cloudflare scraper, a tool that gets past those defenses to pull data from protected sites, comes in handy. This guide breaks down how Cloudflare spots bots, why most scrapers fail, and how to scrape with Decodo's Web Data API.

Context7 MCP is an MCP server from Upstash that brings up-to-date, version-specific library documentation and code examples into AI coding agents such as Cursor and Claude Code. Instead of answering library questions from model knowledge alone, the agent can pull relevant documentation at request time. This guide covers how that works, setup, pricing, and where Context7 stops being useful.

Proxies for LLM training are the routing layer that lets a data collection pipeline fetch web pages at massive scale without being blocked. Training a language model involves fetching millions of pages, and most sites won't serve that volume to a single IP address. This guide covers proxy selection, bandwidth sizing, pipeline design, and compliance.

An AI agent framework gives a language model the structure to plan tasks, call tools, maintain state, and decide what to do next until it reaches a goal. With most frameworks now offering similar core capabilities, choosing one comes down less to feature count and more to language support, orchestration, durability, and your existing stack. This guide compares 9 leading AI agent frameworks and helps you find the right fit for your project.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets an AI model discover and call external tools while it runs. The MCP vs. API question comes up because an API (application programming interface) is a contract developers write code against ahead of time, and both connect software to outside systems at different layers. Here's where each fits.

Agentic web scraping is web scraping where an AI agent decides what to do, rather than following a fixed sequence of steps. It identifies the information it needs and chooses its own actions, such as following a link, opening another page, or extracting specific content. This guide explains how agentic web scraping works and when to use it, along with the best agentic scraping tools in 2026.

Self-healing selectors let a scraper relocate the data it's looking for after a site's HTML changes, instead of breaking and needing a manual fix. Search interest in AI-driven scraping has spiked sharply lately, and open-source tools built around this idea have seen rapid adoption, as site redesigns get more frequent and selector maintenance becomes the real cost of running a scraper.

ShieldFont is an open-source web font that swaps some of a page's words in the HTML source for different ones and redraws the originals on screen through the font's own rendering rules. The idea is to make the writing harder to use in AI training without permission. In this blog post, we'll tackle how the mechanism works and where it stops.

The best ISP proxies pair ISP-registered IPs with datacenter hosting. This guide compares 8 providers by price, format, coverage, protocol support, and trial terms. Independent 2026 benchmarks place Decodo in the top 3 for its flexible plans, shared and dedicated formats, and low starting price.