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What is Web Scraping and what proxies to use

What is Web Scraping

Web scraping is a procedure of collecting information from various web resources, organizing it into tables, and using it for marketing, research, and other purposes. Sometimes scraping is called parsing. Parsing is practically the same as Web Scraping, so in this article, we will use these two terms as synonyms.

This tool is most often used by Internet marketers, businessmen, journalists, or scientists. For example, parsing is suitable for analyzing competitors on Instagram or Facebook to collect data about the audience, competitors, etc.

The work of this system consists in "scraping" the necessary information and takes place in several stages:

  • Keywords, numbers, or phrases are entered into the program;
  • The system visits various sites and collects the necessary data;
  • All information is automatically analyzed and sorted into tables so it is convenient to use further.

Sometimes good web scraping requires programming skills. But there are also simpler programs that you can work with without this knowledge. For example, for web scraping, many people use the Python library, which allows you to collect data through HTML code.

Why proxy is needed for Web scraping

Parsing data on the Internet is not prohibited, but the owners of web resources are not very happy when someone "scraps" their information. After all, competitors often do this for their commerce. Therefore, site administrators often block any web scraping programs so that competitors do not get data from their web resources. They will track from which IP address the scraping occurred and block this user.

To bypass and avoid blocks, we recommend using reliable web scraping proxies. With Web scraping proxy you will be able to:

  • Hide your IP address;
  • Use several IP addresses at once for different tasks;
  • Bypass all regional blocks and restrictions of providers in the network;
  • Get more specific and relevant information from web resources.

What proxies to use for Web scraping

You can use Mobile, Data Center, and Residential proxies. All of them are suitable for web scraping, however, Mobile ones will be the fastest and most reliable. Data centers may not be the most reliable and sometimes get into blocks. Residential ones are quite safe, but they do not differ in speed and multitasking.

The main thing: use high-quality personal proxies to increase the success rate and protect yourself as much as possible. Have a great scraping!