How to Scale Web Scraping Tasks

 In 2022 the transmission, extraction, and management of digital public data are all about scalability. Even with web scrapers – efficient data aggregation bots plaguing the modern business environment, companies and freelancers are looking for new ways to bend software and technology in ways that break the current limits of efficiency.

By design, web scrapers are not very complex tools, but their efficient application is the key to fast information utilization and analysis. Even casual internet users can find ways to use data collection bots to improve the goals of browsing sessions and save money. Modern companies need web scraping for market research, identification of advertisers, price intelligence, and other data-sensitive tasks that squeeze out the benefits from the acquired knowledge.

While we take new IT inventions and the creation of efficient software for granted, the digital revolution has transformed every aspect of communication and research yet we are driven by the desire to continue improving and automating.

With little programming knowledge, you can learn about web scrapers and prepare to be surprised by their primitive nature. Most data aggregation tools focus on specific monotonous extraction tasks where technological efficiency is much more valuable than the human ability of multitasking.

Even if one data scraper is much faster than the process of manual, human research, the drive to compete and outperform other competitors on the market encourages us to scale up our tasks and push peak efficiency. With massive amounts of public information on the web, touching upon every imaginable topic, using multiple scrapers at the same time no longer seems like an overkill but a necessary solution for quick usage and analysis of available knowledge.

In this article, we will focus on the process of web scraping, the most common data aggregation use cases, and additional tools and techniques that guarantee effective scalability. By the end, you will understand the difference between a raw web scraper written by a beginner and a complex, multifunctional web scraping API. Of course, choosing or creating your lightweight tool instead of paying for a web scraping API is a better option that will strengthen your knowledge without spending money. However, for effective data extraction scalability that provides great assistance for modern businesses, having a web scraping API or multiple scrapers with proxy servers is far more efficient and manageable.

Web scraping bots explained

Web scraping bot is a conjoint software that consists of a web scraper – a fully automated HTML code extractor, and a parser or utilization of a parsing library that filters the information and structures it into desired, readable and usable data sets. The latter segment is a bit tricky because web building tools are often different. Changes in structure and used plugins can throw off your parser. This is the only part of data collection that needs monitoring, making it difficult to fully automate. When both segments do their job without interruptions, we end up with restructured public data, purposefully collected for assistance for many business tasks.

Your IP address is banned – what happened?

If you are using your code or an advanced no-code scraper, one day you might notice that your IP address gets blacklisted on a targeted web server. That may happen in your automated tools sending too many connection requests, and recipient security tools flag them as bot traffic. To make sure that only real persons visit the page and the server is not overwhelmed with excessive connection requests, owners use these algorithms to block IP addresses.

We can tune down the efficiency of data scrapers to avoid detection or assign a different network identity to prevent detection in the future. For effective IP masking, proxy servers are your best bet because you reroute bot traffic through an intermediary server without affecting the rest of the connection on your device. Even better, if you encounter something that is unavailable in your region, you can choose a residential IP with the help of a legitimate provider to continue extracting data from your target. 

Proxy servers – the key to scraping scalability

The same tools that help us maximize the efficiency and consistency of proxy servers are essential for web scraping scalability. When using multiple data collection bots at the same time we can use a large pool of IP addresses to assign a different identity to each bot. When a large influx of traffic is diversified with the help of many access points in different locations, concurrent connections become far less suspicious. Even if one address manages to flare up bot detection algorithms, the best proxy providers have millions of residential addresses that will reestablish a broken connection. To guarantee successful data extraction businesses use rotation settings for web scrapers and proxy APIs to make sure the monotonous behavior cannot be tied to one IP, even if it is not your address.

Read Also: How To Do Web Scraping Using Python