If you are a tech enthusiast, chances are high that you are already aware of the significance of a proxy for web scraping. Web scraping, the process of extracting vital information from a website is greatly backed by a proxy and without which the art of web scraping is mostly incompetent. A website scraping application undergoes the operation of scraping tonnes of thousands of web pages, and that is quite normal. Regardless of how many pages it runs, usage of a proxy API for web scraping is always advantageous for offering reliable results.
But, What is a Proxy Scraper?
A web scraping proxy can be defined as a proxy server that is utilized for every web scraping requirement. With the help of a proxy, you can permit your request through it and employ its IP address. To comprehend it better, let us understand what an IP address is as well. All devices are affixed to a network, for instance, the internet, which further represents a rare numeric address for other network devices to recognize it. An example is 193.0.2.1.
The function of a proxy API for web scraping is altering the IP address when you are delivering a request or running the scraper, it makes its way through the third-party server. On the other end, the server hosting the website will notice their IP address and not yours.
The HTTP request will move directly to the website in the absence of a proxy server placed between you and the website the scraper wishes to scrape. It is the server that will utilize a proxy and act as an arbitrator between the Zillow scraper and where the request is moving.
Categories of Proxy Scrapers
After gaining quite some insights about a proxy API for web scraping, it is essential to know the types of proxies based on IPs.
- Residential IPs: Residential IPs are focused on residential addresses generally assigned by an Internet Service Provider or ISP. This one is a genuine IP address holding a specific physical location present anywhere across the world. Such IPs are improbable to be blocked by a website server since they appear true. Though, these IPs come with a high price tag.
- Data Center IPs: This is the most common among all scrapers. These IPs are born from data centers with servers and have got their names from themselves. They are affordable, swift, and accurate.
- Mobile IPs: These are IPs sourced through network carriers. They are more or less similar to residential IPs. These are slightly expensive in nature.
What are the Advantages of Employing Proxies in Web Scraping?
Proxies are of great help in web scraping, and the following benefits explain it all.
- Examine Anonymously
It is because of the type of web scraping, you might not wish to expose the specification of your device. In case a website recognizes your identity, you might be covered with ads, your private IP data might be tracked and you might even be blocked from visiting that site. But, with a proxy scrape, you use a proxy server IP instead of yours.
- Aversion of IP Blocks or Bans
Getting your IP banned is quite a regular phenomenon. But, when you are using a proxy, your IP is unlikely to get blocked or banned. Contemporary websites are generally fixed with Crawl data limitations and other anti-bot inspection features. These factors restrict the scarpers from producing numerous requests to their sites. Although, employing a group of proxies for delivering traffic through multiple IP addresses might help avoid factors like rate boundaries.
- Key to Location-Specific Data
There are sites that restrain visitors from other regions. They have switched on region-specific content that presents content only based on the location of the IP address. But, when using a proxy API for web scraping, you will have access to the content. A regular example of this is the e-commerce sites retrieving the price data in multiple currencies.
- Aids in High-Volume Scraping
In cases where the amount of data that needs to be scraped is quite vast, the time taken for performing the job becomes essential. In these cases, implementing proxies is the ideal way. Incorporating a huge pool of proxies will enable you to perform multiple things simultaneously like running concurrent sessions that will boost the speed of the data scraping method.
Though there are plentiful ways to acquire proxies, only a few of them are reliable and offer diverse features. Only opt for those address API that offers millions of IPs, high concurrency, automatic proxy rotation, Javascript rendering, and so on. It is always good to start with a free version and then move to a premium one.
