Data Collection

Web scraping without getting blocked is one of the hardest challenges you might face. Whether you’re a business conducting market research or a solopreneur working on your next big thing, most scrapers fail not because the code is wrong, but because websites now run layered detection that flags bots before a single byte of HTML is returned. This guide breaks down all the detection layers, including network, TLS, browser, and behavioral, and delivers the best techniques on how to overcome each.

Modern web apps don’t load everything at once, so running scripts too early leads to missed data, broken actions, and flaky results. 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.

Most AutoGPT tutorials stop at "get it running", but that's the easy part. The harder part that determines whether your agents are useful is connecting them to live data, and AutoGPT helps you fix that. This guide covers AutoGPT local setup, UI navigation, custom Python block development, and the integration patterns that turn AutoGPT into a production workflow tool.

Bash may not be the go-to tool for web scraping, but it's more capable than you'd think. This article covers how to make HTTP requests from the Linux command line, parse HTML and JSON output, set up proxy support with Decodo, schedule scrapers using cron and systemd timers, and build a fully working Bash-based scraper from scratch.

Standard Selenium ChromeDriver is blocked by most protected websites in the first few requests. Anti-bot services like Cloudflare, DataDome, and HUMAN (formerly PerimeterX) can detect automation flags, WebDriver properties, and browser fingerprint gaps before the first page finishes loading. The undetected_chromedriver library patches ChromeDriver to reduce these detection signals and works as a drop-in Selenium WebDriver replacement. This guide shows what actually gets flagged, how the patches work, and how to fill the gaps with proxies and behavioral techniques.

Your cURL command works flawlessly in the terminal. It has for weeks. Then your boss asks, "Can you make this run in JavaScript?" and suddenly you're here. Good news: you have options. You can run the system cURL binary directly from Node.js, or you can ditch cURL entirely and use a native JavaScript HTTP client that does the same job. This article walks through both paths – child_process, node-libcurl, Fetch, and Axios, plus a flag-by-flag cURL-to-JS translation guide and a decision framework so you don't pick the wrong one.

Most Shopify stores have a built-in JSON endpoint for product data: prices, variants, inventory, images. Web scraping Shopify means requesting /products.json, paginating, and getting the catalog as JSON. But the endpoint is limited to 250 products per page, and some merchants disable it. This guide covers both: the JSON approach for stores that have it, and the fallback for stores that don't.

Axios POST headers are one of the most important items for JavaScript developers working with HTTP. Configure them incorrectly, and your requests fail, authentication breaks, or data gets rejected. The good news? Axios gives developers several ways to manage headers, including inline on individual requests, globally via defaults, through reusable instances, and dynamically with interceptors. This guide explores how to use Axios to set headers across all request types, covering POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE requests, plus common pitfalls and fixes.

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.

Scraping emails from a website is essential for lead generation, partner research, and CRM enrichment. However, to reliably scrape emails from a website, you need to handle multiple formats, including mailto links, plain-text addresses, obfuscated strings, and JavaScript-rendered content. This guide shows how to safely build a Python email scraper and scale it into a multi-page crawling workflow.

Browser-use is a Python library that lets an AI agent control a real browser – navigating dynamic pages, submitting forms, and extracting structured data without brittle selectors. Unlike traditional headless browser setups wired to rigid rules, it reasons with what it sees and adapts. By the end of this guide, you'll have a working agent scraping product data, interacting with web apps, and handling failure scenarios.

Bulk text extraction has become an inseparable part of modern-day existence, with real-world cases including building datasets for LLM training, archiving, content analysis, and RAG systems. However, extracting all text is far more complex than scraping a single page, so we’ve prepared a step-by-step guide to discover pages, extract clean text, remove unnecessary elements, and export structured datasets into proper formats. The tools we use are Python, Beautiful Soup, Playwright, and Decodo proxies.

Python is usually the first choice for web scraping, but it can struggle in high-throughput scenarios where you’re fetching many pages concurrently or need stronger reliability. That’s where Rust comes in. In this tutorial, you’ll build a Hacker News scraper in Rust, covering setup, JSON output, and scaling, along with where Rust excels, where it adds friction, and when to offload to a managed scraping API.

Traditional scrapers return raw HTML. Turning that raw data into structured AI-ready data takes 50%+ extra engineering time, and pushing it directly into an LLM quickly becomes expensive at scale. Crawl4AI was built for that gap: Playwright rendering, automatic Markdown conversion, and native LLM extraction in one open-source framework. This guide takes you from a basic page crawl to production-ready structured data extraction.

Playwright MCP is one of the most accessible ways to get started if you need data from a website but do not want to write scraping code. It enables an AI application or agent to control a browser, interact with web pages, and extract content just like a regular user would. In this article, you’ll learn what Playwright MCP is, how to set it up, and how to use it to scrape websites with natural language.

You've likely encountered “REST API” in documentation, job descriptions, or technical discussions, but what is a characteristic of the REST API? While APIs power everything from mobile apps to enterprise integrations, most developers implement them, ignoring their architectural constraints. In this guide, we'll break down the six characteristics of REST APIs from Roy Fielding's 2000 dissertation and explain why they matter for building scalable, maintainable systems.

Every Glassdoor scraping tutorial that uses Selenium or Playwright fails for the same reason: Cloudflare anti-bot protection fingerprints the TLS connection and blocks non-browser traffic. Glassdoor has internal API endpoints that return the same structured JSON that the frontend uses, without rendering a page. Because these endpoints accept standard HTTP calls, you can bypass Cloudflare by calling them with Python and curl_cffi for browser-grade TLS fingerprinting, plus Decodo residential proxies for IP rotation. This guide covers 4 complete scrapers for reviews, jobs, interviews, and company profiles.

Scraping Google can quickly turn frustrating when you're repeatedly met with CAPTCHA challenges. Google's CAPTCHA system is notoriously advanced, but it’s not impossible to avoid. In this guide, we’ll explain how to bypass Google CAPTCHA verification reliably, why steering clear of Selenium is critical, and what tools and techniques actually work in 2026.