What is Web Scraping?

Sometimes it’s about working smarter, not harder. Web scraping lets you skip all the tedious work in research while still getting the information you want. And proxies will help you use it to its fullest potential.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is an automated process that gathers data from target websites. You can choose to extract all the information from a site, or just what you find relevant. It’s then exported and parsed into a CSV file, an Excel sheet, or JSON for later use.

Similarly to the top use cases for residential IPs, with web scraping you can:

• Conduct market research
• Generate leads for your sales team
• Keep an eye on reviews (both on your company and competitors)
• Monitor prices on certain products
• Track SEO for your business

Types of web scrapers

It doesn’t matter if you’re a programming pro or a beginner, web scraping tools are for anyone. Figure out what’s right for your project to save time (and stress):

• Browser extensions. These are the easiest to use and sometimes even free. They’re suitable for small projects, but it comes with the most limitations where you can be confined to scrape a page at a time.
• PC software. They’re compatible with most operating systems and provide a positive, responsive user experience. Once installed, you can scrape a small to medium amount of data.

Cloud-based. It’s the most reliable and flexible solution that’s not OS-dependent. It can be more expensive, but it has the processing power and cloud storage to scrape lots of data.

You can also opt for in-house web scraping with a team of developers. Just be sure to have a strong set of resources in hardware and bandwidth. Although it takes more effort to maintain, it allows for more control on your project needs.

Why use proxies for web scraping?

When you’re web scraping on the regular, the last thing you want is to get blocked from a site. By using residential proxies, you’re able to bypass the restrictions. You can scrape anonymously and submit multiple requests on the same site from a pool of residential IPs. Plus, you’re able to geo-target more countries and scrape sites at an international level.

Scrape more with our 70m+ residential IPs at Proxyverse. Here, we make it effortless to acquire the data you need.

Written by,

Joshika Andersson
Proxyverse.io