Data Collection

The process of data collection is vital in all kinds of industries. It helps businesses learn about the market, know their customers better and adapt to their needs. Data collection can be automated by scraping a set target. It’s extra useful for analyzing business competition, records, trends, and other data.

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DATA COLLECTION

Price Scraping: How To Build a Scraper, Test It, and Scale With Confidence

Price data is important for monitoring competitors in eCommerce, enforcing MAP policies, and receiving deal alerts. Doing this manually isn't effective for scaling. A practical approach is price scraping, which helps automatically collect product pricing data from eCommerce websites. This guide will show you how to build a Python scraper using Playwright. It will help you gather real prices, deal with anti-bot measures, and create structured JSON data.

Lukas Mikelionis

Last updated: Jun 08, 2026

20 min read

NEW

DATA COLLECTION

C++ Web Scraping: A Practical Guide for Performance-Critical Projects

C++ web scraping is the process of sending HTTP requests from a C++ program, retrieving HTML or other structured responses, and parsing the data using libraries such as libcurl, CPR, libxml2, or pugixml. It's most useful in scraping workloads where CPU efficiency, memory control, predictable latency, or direct integration with an existing C++ system matter more than quick setup. That makes it a practical option for performance-critical pipelines, but a heavier one to build and maintain. The real question isn't whether C++ can scrape the web. It's whether that extra control is worth the extra engineering work.

Lukas Mikelionis

Last updated: Jun 04, 2026

14 min read

NEW

DATA COLLECTION

Puppeteer Form Submit: A Practical Guide to Reliable Form Automation

Submitting forms with Puppeteer goes beyond just clicking a button on the browser or typing text into an input box. Puppeteer is a Node.js library that can control a headless or headful Chromium (browser) instance through the DevTools Protocol. That means you can use Puppeteer to automatically locate form fields, fill input boxes with necessary values, trigger the action of submitting a form, and confirm whether that form submission actually worked. If you’re into web scraping, or you’re testing your own product, or even automating anything in a browser with JavaScript, you’ll inevitably run into form fields and submit buttons that you will need to get passed programmatically with Puppeteer.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: Jun 04, 2026

25 min read

NEW

DATA COLLECTION

PYTHON

MechanicalSoup Python: A Complete Guide to Scraping, Forms, and Proxies

When you need to scrape 50 pages of search results behind a login wall, raw Requests + Beautiful Soup force you to track cookies and assemble form payloads by hand, while Selenium launches a full browser for pages that don't even use JavaScript. MechanicalSoup sits between those extremes. It wraps Requests and Beautiful Soup into a stateful browser that handles web scraping sessions, forms, and navigation automatically. This guide covers everything from installation to proxy-powered production scrapers.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: Jun 03, 2026

16 min read

NEW

DATA COLLECTION

UNBLOCK

How to Bypass Cloudflare: Complete Guide to Anti-Bot Evasion

Cloudflare is a massive global cloud network that sits firmly between your scraper and the data you need, blocking all requests that fail its multi-layered detection system. It powers nearly 21% of all websites globally, meaning that 1-in-5 sites rely on this network. Therefore, knowing how to bypass it is essential for serious scrapers. This practical walkthrough covers detection methods, tools like Puppeteer and Playwright, and both DIY approaches and managed solutions, including proxy strategies and web scraping APIs.

Vilius Sakutis

Last updated: Jun 02, 2026

10 min read

DATA COLLECTION

Puppeteer Infinite Scroll: A Practical Scraping Guide

If you try to run curl on an infinite scroll page and then search (grep) for the content, the result will show zero matches. The required items aren't available in the initial HTML. The content is loaded using fetch requests that the page sends when a scroll event is triggered. This guide will cover: diagnosing the target, three scroll strategies, verification, speed, anti-detection methods, and a real-world walkthrough.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: May 29, 2026

25 min read

DATA COLLECTION

PYTHON

How To Build a Rank Tracker: Manual Checks, Python Automation, and Modern SERP Tracking

On a recent run, wired.com ranked no. 1 on US desktop and no. 2 on UK desktop computers for "best laptop 2026". Same query, same hour, different country. That gap is what a single-number rank tracker misses, especially now that modern SERPs add AI Overview citations, featured snippets, and "People also ask" blocks that most older tracking tools ignore. This post walks through building a tracker that captures all of it, starting with a manual baseline for ground truth, then moving to a Python implementation against a SERP API, and finally setting up a scaling path for more keywords and locations.

Kipras Kalzanauskas

Last updated: May 28, 2026

20 min read

DATA COLLECTION

API vs. Web Scraping: How to Choose the Right Data Collection Method

Web data extraction typically follows two main paths: requesting through an API or directly scraping target pages. If you're building distributed data pipelines, your choice can impact scalability, reliability, and overall cost. In this guide, we'll explore what each path entails, provide a detailed comparison between them, and explain when to use APIs, web scraping, or both.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: May 27, 2026

12 min read

DATA COLLECTION

Web Scraping in Dify: A No-Code Guide

Dify is an open-source platform for building LLM apps and AI workflows visually. It gives teams a drag-and-drop canvas for chaining LLMs, tools, and APIs into complete AI workflows. Modern AI apps need fresh, structured web data, but most teams don't want to write and maintain Python scrapers. In this article, you'll learn how to build a no‑code Dify workflow and switch to a managed Web Scraping API when basic plugins aren't enough.

Lukas Mikelionis

Last updated: May 27, 2026

12 min read

DATA COLLECTION

How to Scrape IMDb Data: Step-by-Step Guide with Python

To scrape IMDb data with Python at scale, you work with the 6 data layers IMDb sends to the browser instead of parsing the rendered HTML. IMDb is a Next.js application sitting behind AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) Bot Control, and the data lives in JSON-LD blocks, hydration payloads, and an internal GraphQL endpoint. To reach any of them past IMDb's WAF, you need more than plain requests and a real User-Agent, and the rest of this guide builds the setup that holds up.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: May 26, 2026

25 min read

DATA COLLECTION

Using Cursor AI To Build a Web Scraper: From Setup to Production With Decodo

Cursor AI is a code-aware IDE that generates, debugs, and refines scraper code through natural language, advancing AI-assisted scraping from concept to production. Building scrapers by hand means dealing with selector breakage, anti-bot walls, and proxy rotation logic that compounds every time a target site changes. This article covers setup, Cursor rules, scraper types, Decodo MCP integration, and project maintenance.

Lukas Mikelionis

Last updated: May 25, 2026

7 min read

DATA COLLECTION

PARSING

Selecting Elements by Class in XPath: Syntax, Examples, and Pitfalls

Class names are often the quickest way to target elements when you scrape a page. But in XPath, they are not as simple as they look. Because HTML stores multiple classes inside a single space-separated attribute value, a selector that seems correct can still match the wrong element or miss the right one entirely. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to select elements by class in XPath, when to use exact or partial matching, and how to avoid common class matching pitfalls.

Mykolas Juodis

Last updated: May 25, 2026

5 min read

PYTHON

DATA COLLECTION

urllib3 vs. Requests: Which Python HTTP Library to Use?

Choosing between urllib3 and Requests is like choosing between a manual and an automatic transmission, except one (Requests) is built into the other (urllib3). The automatic gets you moving in seconds, but the manual gives you control over every shift. Both libraries power web scraping, API calls, and automation, and this article will tell you which belongs in your project.

Vilius Sakutis

Last updated: May 22, 2026

10 min read

PYTHON

DATA COLLECTION

What is Charles Proxy: Traffic Inspection, Debugging, And Web Scraping Guide

Charles Proxy (or simply Charles) is an HTTP debugging proxy that acts as a man-in-the-middle between the computer and the internet, which developers and QA teams use to monitor, inspect, and modify data flow. In web scraping, it allows users to intercept, decrypt, and manipulate network traffic to extract data. This guide covers setup, core features, SSL handling, practical use cases, scraping workflows, troubleshooting, and notable alternatives of Charles Proxy.

Mykolas Juodis

Last updated: May 20, 2026

8 min read

DATA COLLECTION

How to Send JSON With cURL: Syntax, Flags, and Practical Examples

If you work with APIs, webhooks, automation scripts, or web scraping, chances are you've needed to send JSON with cURL. cURL is one of the most widely used command line tools for making HTTP requests, and modern APIs almost always rely on JSON payloads. In this guide, you’ll learn how to send JSON with cURL, work with files and authentication, debug requests, and route traffic through proxies when needed.

Mykolas Juodis

Last updated: May 20, 2026

29 min read

DATA COLLECTION

PYTHON

Elixir Web Scraping: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide

Elixir web scraping solves one of the hardest problems in high-volume data collection: concurrency without thread overhead. The BEAM virtual machine (Erlang's runtime) runs each HTTP request as a lightweight process, not an OS thread, so you can fetch thousands of pages concurrently. If a process crashes, the supervisor restarts it automatically. This guide builds a complete Elixir scraper from scratch, covering static pages, paginated targets, JavaScript-heavy sites, and anti-bot countermeasures.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: May 19, 2026

25 min read

DATA COLLECTION

Asynchronous Web Scraping in Python: Build Faster Scrapers With asyncio and aiohttp

A scraper that fetches pages one at a time spends most of its time waiting on the network. Asynchronous web scraping in Python (built on asyncio and aiohttp) fixes that by handling many requests at once on a single event loop. This guide walks through building a working async scraper, then covers the proxy, retry, and anti-bot escalation patterns you'll need at scale.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: May 18, 2026

25 min read

DATA COLLECTION

PARSING

XPath Using Text: How to Select Elements by Text Value

HTML structure shifts constantly, but the visible text on a page tends to remain more stable. That stability is what makes text-based selectors useful in web scraping. This guide covers the core functions you need to work with text in XPath: text(), contains(), starts-with(), normalize-space(), and translate(), including where each one breaks and how to combine them to build selectors that survive page updates.

Lukas Mikelionis

Last updated: May 15, 2026

10 min read