Data Collection

Google has become a gateway to easily-accessible information. And one of the best ways to make use of Google’s limitless knowledge is data scraping. We’ve just released a detailed blog post about scraping Google SERPs with Python, where we cover lots of useful info, including the technical part. So before you dive into this tutorial – check it out.

But what if Python is not exactly your forte? This blog post will show you how to scrape SERPs using a simpler method. One that doesn't require much tech knowledge or downloading loads of applications and software. So, what do you know about web scraping with cURL and Terminal?

If you're fresh-new to data scraping, you may not be familiar with selectors yet. Let us introduce ya – selectors are objects that find and return web items on a page. These pieces are an essential part of a scraper, as they affect your tests' outcome, efficiency, and speed.

Yep, understanding the idea of a selector isn't that complicated. Finding the right selector itself might be. To be honest, even the two languages that define them, XPath and CSS, have their own pros and cons. So it can quickly become a headache to choose one of them. But here's some good news – we're here to help! Let's explore it together.

Businesses collect scads of data for a variety of reasons: email address gathering, competitor analysis, social media management – you name it. Scraping the web using Python libraries like Scrapy, Requests, and Selenium or, occasionally, the Node.js Puppeteer library has become the norm.

But what do you do when you bump into the iron shield of anti-scraping tools while gathering data with Python or Node.js? If not too many ideas flash across your mind, this article is literally your stairway to heaven cause we’re about to learn the most common anti-scraping techniques and how to combat them.

Amazon is a dominant retail force. Many smaller businesses either work under Amazon’s brand or try to compete with it. Your business cannot go up against Amazon in terms of pricing data that you have access to. Marketing agencies often rely on scraping Amazon prices to gather data on relevant products. Nevertheless, this approach is risky, because it goes against Amazon’s terms of service. The online retail giant’s system is also very vigilant to outright ban any visitors that try scraping techniques. This is why you need an Amazon proxy server to scrape it successfully.

Selenium is the perfect web development and testing tool. It lets you use every major browser and access any site or service you want to test. This versatility makes Selenium indispensable for more than just testing. For example, you can use Selenium with Python to scrape websites. Of course, you will need a proxy service to not get blocked. This is why we are doing this short introduction about how a Selenium proxy network can help you.

Scrapy and BeautifulSoup are two extremely popular Python-based tools that will enable you to scrape the web. Ah, and they’re free and open-source! So if you’re thinking of building a scraper, you might be a bit lost between the two options. 

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. This blog post will compare these two tools by looking over their main fors and againsts. Ready? Let’s go!

Web scraping is a well-known technique for extracting data from various websites. The presumption is that you can scrape any data if it is publicly available. So are there any unscrapable websites?

I have to share the good news with you – technically, all of them are scrapable if you know how to do it. The thing is that some are harder to crack than others. Certain webmasters can be very anxious and overly protective of their content. They try to guard it by using various anti-scraping techniques and tools. It’s understandable but quite tricky.

You see, the internet has its own set of rules, and if you’re able to access data publicly, you can easily collect it too. Of course, you should abide by the laws concerning copyright protection if you publish your findings.

Have you ever woken up all sweaty in the middle of the night with one question in mind: have I done something wrong by scraping Amazon? Well, you can answer this question in several ways. The good news is that they don’t necessarily give you a one-way ticket to scraping prison!

Just a quick heads up – this article is for informational purposes only and it doesn’t constitute legal advice.