Public Data Collection Scalability

Over the years, web scraping has become a go-to choice for fast, efficient data acquisition and management. If we look at the internet as a giant, ever-growing world built from digital information, none of us could ever consume and utilize all the knowledge contained within it. To chip away at the available data, we must apply technological solutions and automation tools. Just as technology built the overwhelming information systems, the same technology can be bent to aid in data aggregation and analysis.

In 2024, we have thousands of web scrapers swarming the web servers and doing the bidding of their owners. Data aggregation tools help us collect and utilize public information faster but when most modern companies and business-minded individuals employ the same tactics, the ones that want to remain competitive and outperform others need the best data scrapers and the tools for scalability.

In this article, we will give a brief introduction to web scrapers and help you make the right choice of software for your goals. After that, we will address the essential tools for scalability proxy servers or APIs. For example, if you want to collect the most relevant information from search engines, you will need a SERP scraping API capable of constant extraction of search results on Google and other most popular engines without exposing your real identity.

By reaching out to top proxy server providers on the market, you can get yourself a protected SERP scraping API and scale up your data extraction tasks in an instant. If some website owners become suspicious, you can utilize rotation options offered by the best suppliers. This way, every web scraper, and SERP scraping API have a new proxy server at your desired time intervals! Let’s discuss web scraping and then dive deeper into the process of scalability.

Data scraping ─ buying a scraper vs writing your script

Web scrapers are not complicated pieces of software. You can create your simple scraping script with Python or copy code online without much programming knowledge. Primitive web scrapers act as an effective tutorial that will help you better understand the relationship between the scraper and parsing tools or libraries, which are the key to deconstructing the HTML code into a comfortable data set.

If you want quick results, you can find the best no-code scrapers with a graphical user interface (GUI) and start extracting information without prior programming knowledge. While it is a costly option, some businesses gain more from outsourcing such tasks and avoid diversion from already established strengths.

The power of web scraping comes from accelerated data acquisition and customization of parsers. These aggregators help declutter targeted pages and only focus on important information, like price monitoring and the introduction of new products, services, and discount deals. Businesses that get constant reports about these changes on competitor websites can make an adjustment to undercut opponents and remain the most attractive option on the market.

Before starting similar data extraction tasks, make sure to test your skills on websites that do not have protection against web scrapers. This way, you can adjust connection rates and set up appropriate filters that will only focus on specific elements of code and collect the most relevant information. You can start with commonly visited websites like Reddit or Wikipedia which will be perfect sandboxes to test the tools and polish your skills once you feel in control, move to websites that implement rate limiting and similar protection tools to filter out bot traffic. By then, you should know how to control each element of your scraping process and start protecting your network identity with proxy servers.

Web scraping scalability

Web scrapers already seem like a massive improvement from manual browsing, why would you want more? The truth is, you will need to scrape certain websites more than once a day to account for price sensitivity. To keep an eye on every competitor on the market, including their positions in search engines and pages on social media platforms, you will need more than one web scraper. Do not forget that as cool as they seem, one script cannot branch out and affect every target at the same time. All it does is perform its singular task at incredible speed, and the only growth path comes through the appliance of multiple scrapers.

One bot needs a proxy server as protection if its address gets banned and for scalability, you need to utilize the available pool of proxy addresses and have rotation options swap out IPs before the targets start to suspect unnatural activity.

For scalability, the best providers offer the most secure residential proxies. These addresses protect shine at web scraping tasks because they are assigned to real devices by internet service providers at the same time. When we borrow these addresses to perform scraping tasks, recipients have no way of tracing back the IP to your bots. A good provider with a large pool of residential proxies is your best partner for web scraping tasks.