Data Collection

Akamai is one of the most widely deployed bot management systems on the web, and one of the hardest to scrape around. It sits between visitors and a site's servers, analyzing every request across multiple layers to decide what's a real user and what's automated. This guide breaks down how that detection works, the practical techniques for getting past it, and where the technical and legal limits sit.

Wikimon.net is a community-maintained Digimon wiki, but it doesn't offer a public API, so web scraping is the most practical way to pull structured data from its Visual List. In this guide, you’ll build a working Python scraper with Requests and Beautiful Soup to extract Digimon names and image URLs, then save the results to either a CSV file or a MySQL database for later use.

You can’t get any more "real" than mobile and residential proxies. Both are sourced from genuine user devices, with mobile drawing from phones on carrier networks and residential from homes with broadband. In this blog post, we’ll tackle the difference between the two, explaining how each proxy type affects trust, speed, and cost, and how to decide which one belongs in your projects.

A hidden API is an undocumented endpoint that a website's frontend calls in the background, usually through XHR, Fetch, or GraphQL, to load data as JSON. Scraping hidden APIs means calling that endpoint directly instead of parsing the rendered HTML. Many modern websites load the page first, then fetch the actual data this way, so the clean JSON you need is often just one request away. In this guide, you'll learn how to find these hidden APIs and use them to collect structured data faster, without a headless browser.

PerimeterX, now HUMAN, is a cybersecurity platform that employs multiple detection techniques to accurately identify and block threats to web applications. Since numerous high-traffic websites rely on PerimeterX, it's almost inevitable that developers will encounter it when web scraping. This guide explains how PerimeterX detects bots, how to bypass it (tools and strategies), and how to troubleshoot common failures.

Christie's has published more than 4 million sold-lot results online since the mid-1990s, and none of them come with a public API. A Christie's scraper pulls that lot data from christies.com into a structured format like JSON or CSV, using the endpoint that the site's own search calls. This guide shows you how to build it, then covers the buyer's premium, the 10,000-result cap, and the proxy costs.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) lets a language model answer questions using external data rather than frozen training data alone. The sources you feed it decide how accurate, fresh, and relevant those answers are. This guide covers what RAG is, how it works, the available data source types, comparisons with related methods, and the pitfalls to plan for.

Imperva (formerly Incapsula) protects many high-traffic retail, real estate, travel, and job listing websites, making it one of the most common obstacles you'll encounter while web scraping. But once you understand how it works, it becomes much easier to work around. In this guide, you'll learn how Imperva detects bots, practical ways to reduce blocks, and where DIY approaches start reaching their limits.

Web scraping with Perl is popular for elite text processing and superior execution speed. Perl has first-class regex built right into the language, no imports, no setup, which makes extracting structured data fast and precise. In this guide, you'll go from a Perl HTTP request to a scraper that fetches and parses web data, handles sessions, and exports data.

An Apache proxy server can work in two directions. As a forward proxy, it sits between your client and the internet, hiding who's making the request. As a reverse proxy, it sits in front of your backend servers, hiding what's running behind them. Apache HTTP Server handles both well, and it's already installed on most Linux boxes, has a mature module ecosystem, and costs nothing. This guide walks you through setting up both modes from scratch, configuring a reverse proxy in front of Tomcat, and routing Selenium scraper traffic through your forward proxy.

The best web scraping proxies stop your scraper from getting rate-limited, CAPTCHA-walled, or banned outright. Pick the wrong one and the blocks start within minutes. What works depends on your target, your scale, and your budget. This guide walks through the proxy types, how to choose, the providers worth knowing, and how to actually run them.

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.

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.