Web scraping has become a common practice in the world of digital business. The internet is full of public information that can be used by companies or freelancers to boost and enhance their tasks and goals.
The process of automated data extraction has become so popular that businesses that lag in modernization or want to outsource IT tasks to more qualified professionals seek out companies that specialize in web scraping for money.
In this article, we will focus on data collection companies and business-minded individuals that specialize in the usage of web scraping bots and upscaling of extraction tasks. These tasks depend on proxy servers, and using a residential proxy network supplied by a good provider, ensures that this chain of partnerships is efficient and fruitful for everyone involved. The internet is already full of providers that offer intermediary servers and provide the service with customizable features that assist their use. Web scraping tasks need proxies for protection, scaling, and unrestricted access to unavailable pages. For example, without a Russian proxy, many targets of interest may not be available with your real IP address. However, with a local address, you can visit these websites and extract their data but a Russian proxy or a server in another authoritarian country may restrict access to other western websites. Of course, if you are living nowhere near Russia or neighbouring countries, choosing a Russian proxy for scraping tasks will result in a slower internet connection. Use location-specific proxies only when you need to bypass geoblocking. For now, let’s focus on web scraping for money and what qualities of proxy servers assist the process.
Web scraping and aggregator businesses
Web scrapers extract HTML code from targeted websites and use parsers to filter and organize information in a manner that offers knowledge for analysis. Different pages may require changes in parsing, but the result should offer a data set or a succession of sets that aid decision-making for companies, private users, or business-minded individuals.
Let’s start with the average consumer. Even the average web surfer can find benefits in web scraping. For example, why would you search for travel tickets and booking prices yourself if you can use scrapers to automate this task? With the addition of proxy servers, you can scrape the pages from different locations to check if there are different price offers and save money.
For freelancers and companies, data collection shows the price changes and introduction of new products on competitor websites. Fast acquisition of this knowledge allows them to apply changes in pricing and observe the strengths of competitors to devise a further plan of action to outperform them. The internet is full of useful ever-changing public information, and automated extraction helps us utilize it faster.
Last but certainly not least, the aggregator businesses — web scraping experts that either aid other companies by selling data collection services for money or track information of plane tickets, hotel reservations, and real estate businesses on their website while receiving commissions from companies that seek such advertisement.
Proxy servers for web scraping
Most companies that use web scraping either for money or to assist their goals use proxy servers to use another IP address for automated extraction. The intermediary servers change the information attached to the HTTP header before the packets reach their final destination. This way, the identity of the sender gets changed, and the retrieved information (typically an HTML code of a page rendered in a browser) may be different based on the IP address. Here are the trends of proxy use for web scraping and why they are so useful in data extraction procedures.
Slower initial speeds
While using a proxy may slow down your internet speed, the protection ensured by residential addresses outweighs the loss in connection. With the best providers, the response time remains minimal, while the rest depends on location choices. If the targeted content is available in your region, choose a local proxy IP to minimize latency.
Higher data access rate
With residential proxies and rotating sessions, aggregator businesses can utilize thousands of addresses to empower many concurrent scrapers to continue scraping at all times. Rotating proxies keep changing identities for scraping bots, which helps minimize IP bans and ensure a higher data access rate.
Perfect access to local data
Residential proxies can be located anywhere, so connecting to them makes location-restricted data available. Aggregator businesses work with premium providers to focus on local IP pools and rotate between available addresses to collect geoblocked information.
Huge data gathering scale
Most popular providers have massive networks, with tens of millions of proxy IP addresses, and aggregators can rent out as many identities as they can afford to scale up their data gathering operations. Each scraper can have many IPs in a rotation, which greatly reduces the risk of detection.
We live in exciting times where the managed, digital sources of information have more data than we could ever process in our lifetime. The exchange of public knowledge empowers creative businesses that know how to extract, manage, and manipulate aggregated information and helps them thrive in the digital business world. With web scrapers and proxy servers, modern companies dominate their markets with superior knowledge or sell extracted data sets for money.
