Data has always been essential in all walks of life, but over the last thirty years, the digital sphere has hugely increased volume, opening up much larger data mining possibilities and end uses.
Collecting data is now an essential requirement of all industries, and being able to mine this data and turn it into profit has become big business. Because of this major platforms seek to protect the data by instigating blocks against traffic looking to scrape information.
The sheer quantity of data that is available makes collection at scale essential. This will need special tools, such as custom automated bots and/or proxies to be successful.
What is Scraping
Scraping is the act of navigating to a digital asset, such as a website, portal, or database, and mining its data. The data is scraped by you or the agent, visiting the digital asset holding the data or information, extracting the parts you need, and then storing them in a usable form.
Scraping can be carried out on a low level, where just a few records are collected, or on a mass scale, where thousands of pieces of data are needed to provide the necessary material you need. Whichever the case, using a web scraping API like ZenRows comes in handy to extract data from any webpage in minutes.
Why Would You Want to Scrape?
On the simplest level, you could be looking to collate information for an article, a research project, or a book. You could be looking to collect all given data in a particular field to look for connections yet to be found or search for outliers.
Alternatively, you could be looking to track movements, such as changes in various forms of rankings or prices, or you could be monitoring a market for real-time events that can have an impact.
Scraping can be divided into two broad types, information gathering and data tracking, but there can be a considerable crossover between both. The method for conducting the scrape is the same; it is the use case for the mined data that differs.
Scraping at Scale
Although copying and pasting text from a website constitutes scraping this is clearly an inefficient method as you are constrained by time and scope. It might suffice for small research projects, but when it comes to looking at a large number of assets for data mining, or regularly monitoring movements in data, then this would constitute scaping ant scale.
Examples of scraping at scale include the collation of all the information on a given topic for data analysis and evaluation. Alternatively, it could be the daily monitoring and tracking of pricing information across hundreds or thousands of products that affect your business.
Information Gathering
Although it can be considered mundane, general information gathering is carried out on both small and large scales. It can be needed for research as well as for data analysis, where complex algorithms examine it in various ways, looking for hidden connections that can open new doors for education, science, or industry.
As referenced, this could be done by just copying and pasting but any effective method would at the very least, require a system and form of mechanical retrieval.
Data Tracking
Using the same scraping techniques as with information gathering, you can utilize the gathered data to track specific aspects of it over fixed time intervals. Some of the main tracking uses relate to SERPs (search engine ranking page) position, marketing syndication efforts, and competitor tracking.
Each of these uses of tracking can play a crucial role in your business strategy. Daily or even twice-daily updates can help you react more quickly to potential issues. However, these tracking forms require significant scale for them to be effective.
SERPs
The need to track your SERPs is easy to understand. If you receive substantial traffic from organic search, then small changes in the SERPs can significantly hit your bottom line. The difference in traffic generated from being in position one as opposed to position three can, on some search terms, be as much as 50%. The decline continues as you go down the ranking, and beyond the first page is just wilderness.
With new features constantly added to SERPs, available real estate becomes less, and the importance of remaining at the top increases. Knowing when new features are added or when another site pops in front allows you to be able to react to protect your traffic.
Problems Scraping SERPs
Tracking SERPs has significant problems. The sheer scale of the scraping required should not be underestimated. It can involve hundreds of thousands of keywords, each individually tracked through several search engines from multiple locations.
Search engines look to protect this data and don’t want it tracked. They throw up numerous obstacles, primarily based on your IP address, that throw out captures and instigate temporary and permanent IP bans. If you have any hope to track SERPs at scale you need access to tens of thousands of IP addresses, and that means proxies.
Marketing Syndication
Marketing syndication is another form of tracking that is required if part of your marketing strategy is to syndicate your content. Similar to the SERPs tracking, this entails hundreds of thousands of requests sent out over numerous syndication networks in order to monitor shares and likes for each piece of content.
If you produce hundreds of pieces of content each day, the amount of scraping requests scale exponentially across these networks. For networks, they take the same attitudes as search providers and seek to protect the data using similar blocking methods requiring the same solution of sourcing thousands of proxies to complete successful scrapes.
Competitor Tracking
The third tracking pillar is competitor monitoring. E-commerce is a field in which this type of tracking is often essential. Price tracking is likely to be the main task needed, and up-to-date pricing information can be crucial to avoid under or over pricing of your products in the marketplace.
With some e-commerce sites, this can literally require the tracking of hundreds of thousands of products and their variants which would require scraping at scale to keep track of and a method to disguise your access and avoid any blocks.
How Servers Block IPs
IP blocks are one of the most effective blocking methods used by sites. They are easy to implement and scale and can provide a catch-all solution to the problems of data mining and tracking bots.
They work by simply flagging and listing suspicious IPs. Implementation can be just a question of adding to .htaccess files to block. This can be on an individual IP level or subset level, the last octet of the IP group on Apache servers, or the updating core configurations with more sophisticated server setups.
Bans can be temporary or permanent for repeated suspicious activity. Either form of ban will effectively halt your scraping operation.
How Do You Scrape Effectively at Scale?
Scraping at scale needs the right tools for the job. Manual methods will never work with the millions of requests that are often needed to extract the necessary data.
Tools that systematize and automate the process will need to be deployed. Well-designed tools, built on coding bases, such as beautiful soup, that are dedicated to large-scale scraping, change the data mining landscape. Designed correctly, they can submit thousands of requests per second across hundreds of threads.
They will also integrate options for ways to circumvent possible blocks bans and captures.
Getting Around IP Bans
From a website or platforms perspective, IP bans provide an efficient way to mitigate scraping. From the scraper’s point of view they present a serious hurdle.
Getting around their bans can be accomplished in two ways. Using the website’s own API (assuming that it has one) or by utilizing proxies and proxy servers, you might find a scraper API proxy particularly useful.
The official way, using the APi can actually be cumbersome and end up being ineffectual. You can only scrape and retrieve the information that the API rules allow, and these can, and generally do, include rate limiting which can slow the whole process down.
When scraping at scale, this can be just as big an obstacle as IP blocking. This leaves scraping with proxies, the other solution, as the better option, where you keep control of the process.
How Proxies Function
Proxies act as cloaks for your internet traffic. Cloaking works by showing the target site and alternative IP address from the address that the traffic actually originates from. The proxy is attached by passing your traffic through a third-party server where the forward-facing IP is substituted for a new clean IP address.
Assuming your scraping software is configured correctly, and you have the right proxy classification employed in the correct way, your scraping should be successful. The receiving server will let the traffic through because it doesn’t perceive the forward-facing IP as a threat, allowing you to collect the data or information you are targeting.
How Proxies Integrate With These Tools
Integrating proxies with the software tools that are required for scraping is usually straightforward. Each tool will differ, with some having better user interfaces than others. Still, each will almost certainly have boxes or fields in which you would enter the proxy address, a username, and password if your proxy provider has set his system up that way.
Most software will almost certainly include a system for rotating the proxies that you have listed, lessening the chance of IP bans. You can also lease proxies that rotate at the proxy server level. This is often the best choice for scraping at scale, as it provides you access to thousands of proxies for your task.
Conclusion
Information and money have always been symbiotically connected. Nothing has changed in this respect, with those who possess the data jealousy protecting it.
In truth, scraping at scale can only be successfully carried out if you have the right tools for the task. Specialized software can help with the automation and systemization of efficient scraping, but to be able to defeat the praetorian guards set by the data stores to protect their information, you need proxies, a lot of them!
Without proxies, your scraping will be hamstrung. Instead, relying on the site’s own APIs to mine the data you need and playing by their rules becomes the only sustainable option. This can subsequently end in possibly failing to get all of the information to complete a task in good time, or even at all.
