Data on the internet is something that is growing exponentially. The data that was created and stored online in the early days of the internet is only a speck of dust compared to what we have today.
Companies and individuals have been scraping data for years, and they have been doing it for various reasons like market research, brand comparison, price comparison, SEO, and much more. Only in the recent decade or two things have started to become complicated. In the old days, data scraping was done by hand by copying and pasting the data. Today it is a different story.
In order to be able to perform a successful scrape today, you need two things: a scraper and proxies. Today we are going to talk about proxies, what they do when scraping, what types of proxies are the best, and we are going to go over some of the most popular choices. As a bonus, we are going to go over a few scraping APIs that you can use.
What types of proxies are best for scraping?
There are several types of proxies that you can use, and each one has its pros and cons.
Datacenter proxies are IP addresses that providers purchase from datacenters and resell them as proxies. They usually come sequentially and in bulk. They can be used for scraping, but since they are datacenter proxies, there is a great chance that they are already marked as such. That means that strict websites will already have them blacklisted, and you will find yourself in a tight spot.
Residential and mobile proxies are very similar. Residential proxies are IP addresses from real people’s home internet connections. On the other hand, mobile proxies are IP addresses from connections of mobile networks – 3G and 4G. We still haven’t been able to find 5G proxies.
Compared to the datacenter proxies, the residential or mobile is a better choice because they come from real IP addresses from other people’s connections, so the chances of them being flagged as proxies are very small.
Regardless of which proxies you would go for, make sure to get rotating proxies. Using a proxy is one thing, but the type and how you use them can make a huge difference.
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