Why Scraping Public Data is the New Normal Today

London, UK, In the age of evergrowing digital information, making sense of the vast amounts of data and putting it to use is a challenge. And it’s no secret that for various businesses, data is crucial if they want to stay on top of the game in their market. So how to effectively gather relevant information from this vast digital place called the internet? Well, simply by scraping it.

For a few years now, everyone has been testing the limits of web scraping. It’s become the go-to solution to catch a glimpse of what’s happening in the world. All you need to do is to write a nice code or find a quality scraping tool and choose a proxy provider that offers top-notch residential IP addresses.

But if proxies and scraping are news to you, keep reading this article. You’ll find out what exactly web scraping is, what it is used for, how it’s connected to residential proxies, and how to get into the scraping game yourself.

Web scraping is for everyone

Web scraping is an automated process of gathering publicly accessible data en masse. Collecting such info manually would be a colossal waste of time. In other words, by scraping, you can extract valuable information from a certain website by automating this data extraction process. 

Scraping can have numerous purposes. The most popular applications are in marketing, e-commerce, SEO, academic research, brand reputation monitoring, real-time price comparison, competitor analysis, and lead generation. But really, the use cases are endless. Anyone who isn’t scraping public data nowadays is at an obvious disadvantage. Whether you work individually or as part of an enterprise, scraping can help you skyrocket your business to new heights.

There are many scraping tools to facilitate the scraping process. You can get dedicated tools to fulfill any task with the utmost convenience. If you’re interested in scraping search engines, e-commerce platforms, social media, or something else, you bet there’s a tool to help you out! The most recent development has no code scraping tools that don’t require any coding, making everyone capable of web scraping.

Residential proxies to bypass anti-scraping protection

Web scraping is a legal activity, but you must always read and follow your target website’s Terms of Service and robots.txt. Also, infringing copyright, for example, is never cool.  Furthermore, you can check if your targeted website has an API. Just note that using a website’s API is not the same as scraping it. 

But websites use various anti-scraping techniques to protect their content. For instance, one technique that stops a scraping project in its tracks is IP blocking. When a website identifies non-human activity (like multiple visits within seconds or repeating visit patterns), it prevents any connection requests of that particular IP from being answered. So if you get your IP blocked, you won’t be able to scrape any data as you’ll be stopped from connecting to the server of the targeted website. The answer to avoiding IP blocking and scraping without stress is proxies.

More specifically, it’s best to use residential proxies because they grant the user residential IP addresses that belong to real mobile or desktop devices. All residential IP addresses pinpoint to a particular physical location that the proxy user can even select themselves.

Residential proxies are great for scraping websites that are extra sensitive to automated activity. They ensure the delivery of the most successful results, are best for accessing high-value public data, and avoid any detection or blocks.

Aside from scraping tasks, residential proxies are perfect for bot automation, ad verification, accessing geo-restricted content, creating stealth accounts, etc. The bottom line is that you can buy residential proxies and use them for various projects and with any software script, scraper, crawler, browser, or device!

Choosing the right proxy provider

Choosing a reliable proxy provider for quality, longevity, and security is crucial. Going for a free proxy option may be tempting, but that would be a mistake. A free proxy service can be dangerous as it may harvest and leak your personal data. Also, the content you’re targeting might be infected by third-party data. Free proxies are usually slow, inefficient, and easily detected by the targeted websites.

Instead, proxies should be fast, anonymous, and undetectable to do the job right. You can get quality proxies with a high success rate from a reputable proxy provider like Smartproxy. They have one of the largest residential proxy networks with over 40 million residential IP addresses from more than 195 locations worldwide. Also, you can choose between sticky or rotating IPs and select targeting on a city level. With an arsenal of multiple residential IP addresses, scraping becomes a piece of cake.

Final thoughts

Today scraping is not just a nerdy way for tech-savvy people to do business; it’s a standard and legitimate way for businesses to gather data from public sources. Therefore, if you want to see your business flourish, you should seriously look into web scraping and residential proxies.

Most importantly, make sure to get a reliable proxy provider for the best results. Smartproxy offers residential proxy plans for professionals and those just dipping their toes into the proxy waters. Follow the link to learn more!