Data Collection

Book scraping is the process of collecting public book data, such as titles, ratings, reviews, metadata, and available text, from online sources. It has taken on new relevance as AI companies buy and destructively scan physical books for training data. For material that already exists online, scraping offers a lower-friction, non-destructive way to collect some of the same kind of human-written data.

The best residential proxies in 2026 combine high success rates, fast response times, large IP pools, flexible rotation, and competitive pricing. We compared 9 providers on independent benchmark data, pricing, pool size, targeting, and session controls to find the best options for different use cases.

Decodo is the top overall pick for 2026, combining flexible shared and dedicated options, accessible pricing, and strong independent performance. In Proxyway's 2026 US benchmark, Decodo's rotating datacenter pool recorded a 99.94% success rate and 0.35-second average response time across 70,000 requests.

MCP and CLI are simply two ways to give AI agents like Claude, Cursor, or your own custom agent access to tools, either through a structured protocol or through the terminal. MCP standardizes how those tools get discovered, authenticated, and returned as clean output. CLIs, on the other hand, cost almost nothing in context, and models already know them from training. So choosing between the two comes down to your context budget, your workflow, and whether you need to share the tool with other agents.

Proxy vs. VPN comes down to scope: a proxy reroutes selected traffic per app or site, while a VPN encrypts your entire device. Both hide your IP, but proxies are usually faster and more flexible. This guide breaks down the key differences and which one fits your use case.

A rank tracker API gives you concrete data on where a page sits in search results for a given keyword, location, and device. This guide walks through how rank trackers work, how to get your requests running, and what you'll realistically pay per tracked keyword.

GPT-6 Astra web scraping brings a longer context window and sharper browser control to page parsing. OpenAI released the model on September 3, 2026, with a staged rollout across ChatGPT and the API. This article covers what changed for scraping and how it compares to previous ChatGPT models.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) connects one AI application to tools, data, and APIs. A2A (Agent2Agent) lets independent agents delegate work across trust boundaries. A2A vs. MCP is a question of layers, not competition. The usual mistake is adding a second agent where better tools would be enough. This guide measures both and shows which to build on.

This Browser-use tutorial shows you how to point an AI agent at a live browser and have it get real work done. Browser-use is the leading open-source library for giving LLM agents browser control – MIT-licensed, with over 110k GitHub stars. By the end, you'll have an agent scraping product data, working through multi-step flows, and handling failures.

A Grubhub promo offer scraper collects the discounts and perks attached to restaurants. Requesting a restaurant page won't return any of them: Grubhub answers with HTTP 200 and 13,631 bytes of JavaScript shell, byte-identical to the homepage. This guide reverse-engineers the 2 Grubhub endpoints that return the data, builds a working promo collector in Python, and measures what each one omits.

Cloudflare Precursor is a behavioral bot-detection system that constantly analyzes how visitors interact with a website throughout a browsing session. It doesn't check your identity once at a single checkpoint (like a CAPTCHA); instead, it monitors how you interact with the site, such as your mouse movement, keyboard activity, and scrolling. So when you're web scraping or running any sort of browser automation, your script now has to behave like a human for the entire browsing session, not just at certain points like the CAPTCHA point.

Agentic commerce means an AI agent does the shopping: it searches catalogs, compares prices, and sometimes checks out. Retailers are meant to expose a protocol for that. When none is published, the agent reads the product page like a person. We ran 10 US retailer pages through 4 clients, and the best one we built read 5 of them. Adding a real browser didn't help. Correcting its client hints did.

HTTPX, Requests, and AIOHTTP all make HTTP requests, but they differ in how they handle concurrency. Requests is synchronous, HTTPX supports sync and async with HTTP/2, and AIOHTTP is async-only and optimized for high concurrency. This article compares their architecture, performance, proxy setup, migration paths, and common production scraping pitfalls.

Wget is a command-line downloader, and a Wget proxy routes its requests through a different IP address so bans and geo-restrictions don't stop your job. It natively supports routing traffic through any HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP proxy server to fetch files securely. This guide covers three ways to configure a Wget proxy, authenticating and rotating it at scale, working around Wget's missing SOCKS5 support, and troubleshooting the errors you'll hit along the way.

You run kimi mcp add to connect to an MCP server. Kimi Code CLI returns the unknown command 'mcp'. Nothing is broken: Moonshot AI publishes 2 builds that both install a command named kimi, and the mcp subcommand belongs to the other build, where it's documented and works. This guide covers which build to install, how to connect MCP servers, what model access costs, and where the built-in fetch tool stops working on pages with bot detection.

Running cURL in JavaScript means translating a terminal cURL command into a JavaScript or Node.js HTTP request using native APIs or external libraries. If you need to migrate a working terminal cURL command into your codebase, you have options. You can execute the system cURL binary directly using child_process or node-libcurl, or rewrite it natively using Fetch or Axios. This guide provides a flag-by-flag cURL-to-JS translation guide and a decision framework to help you choose the best approach for your stack.

Ad verification is the process of checking that an ad was actually served, where it was reported, to real people, in the intended location. The process depends on a non-advertiser vantage point to provide unbiased metrics. Proxies are the strongest infrastructure layer for independent ad verification. By routing requests through real local IP addresses, auditors can view ads as consumers. This article compares the best proxies for ad verification: Decodo, Bright Data, Oxylabs, SOAX, and IPRoyal.

LLM honeypotting is an emerging deception tactic where websites feed AI crawlers and scrapers plausible-looking but fake or worthless content. That fake data discourages scraping by raising compute costs and degrading what gets collected. It isn't widespread yet, but it's gaining traction. This guide covers what it means for you if you run a scraper, and how to keep your data pipeline clean.