• HTTPS
• Data collection

Scraping experts: Effective web data collection tips

Contents of article:

• What are 7 best web scraping tips?
• 1. Give new browser automation tools a try
• 2. Choose an HTTP client according to goals
• 3. Prepare the scraping session
• 4. Apply DevTools
• 5. Prefer API whenever possible
• 6. Run two and more processes concurrently
• 7. Use more ethical proxies 
• How to collect web data like a pro with Dexodata?

Rules and patterns of business development are a stumbling rock for numerous theories. Their creators describe external and internal corporate processes from view points of competitive advantage, strategic dominance, zero-sum games, etc. There is still no analog of Grand Unified Theory for economical dimensions, however the one thing underlies companies’ evolution. It is a need for actual, accurate data and tools for its acquisition. To buy residential and mobile proxies from the ethical AML and KYC-compliant Dexodata ecosystem is the first step to take. Next moves consist in:

• Choosing tools
• Setting them up, writing automation scripts
• Integrating intermediate IPs into applied frameworks
• Gathering needed knowledge
• Parsing it for crucial elements of knowledge.

Benefits of AI-driven models as no-coding scraping solutions are well-described, which doesn’t mean professionals stay idle. Today, experts share tips on increasing efficiency of detecting and extracting information online. And selecting the best proxies for target sites is only one piece of advice.

What are 7 best web scraping tips?

The expert recommendations listed below are intended to enhance the process of acquiring HTML elements, e.g. reduce the number of requests and residential IPs for buying. The best seven tips on improving web scraping are:

1. Give new browser automation tools a try
2. Choose an HTTP client according to goals
3. Prepare the session
4. Apply DevTools
5. Prefer API whenever possible
6. Run two and more processes concurrently
7. Use more ethical proxies.

These recommendations suit most cases and target proxies’ handling. Nevertheless, their utility depends on the info source characteristics, job scale, required elements’ type, and more.

1. Give new browser automation tools a try

Selenium has served as a versatile information gathering tool for almost two decades. Its high user actions’ emulation abilities come with slow, resource-hungry online page processing and require substantial programming knowledge. Puppeteer is great at running concurrent tasks and is often unsuitable for acquiring insights with methods not involving JavaScript and Chromium-based browsers.

Scraping experts recommend choosing browser automation software considering new solutions. Playwright is faster than the developments mentioned above due to isolated browser contexts, and implements useful features for HTML handling by default, including autowaits, custom selector engines, persisting in authentication state, and more. After a team buys residential and mobile proxies, these IPs are implemented with Playwright easily via browserType.launch and configured in Python or Node.js.

2. Choose an HTTP client according to goals

Preferred language and programming skills level, webpage type, budget and objectives scale are among the factors determining the choice of an HTTP client. Python’s killer features for scraping make its urllib3, requests, httpx, and aiohttp libraries relevant for most tasks.

Ruby’s fast requests processing, Ruby on Rails technology, and SSL verification make Ruby HTTP clients (Faraday, Net::HTTP, HTTParty) suitable for large amounts of information. And using Java for web data harvesting through HttpURLConnection or HttpClient seems logical for multithreading projects. Keep in mind that the chosen HTTP clients base on different SSL libraries and require different TLS parameters.

3. Prepare the scraping session

Those who prepare to collect crucial online insights buy residential IP addresses to act as a regular visitor, not an automated algorithm. Experts recommend other same-purpose measures before running requests to HTML server:

• Change the User-Agent header to present info retrieving actions as an end-user device.
• Set up all possible cookies on your side instead of rely on dynamically generated parameters on servers. These are geolocation, Accept-Language, Referer, etc.
• Reuse session parameters for headers and cookies configurable on client side (e.g. system language).

Experts sometimes do that in headless browsers and transfer parameters to more lightweight browser list scripts.

4. Apply DevTools

Chrome DevTools and its analogs provide technical information on sites and elements experts are going to work with. Here is what the distinct DevTools tabs are useful for:

1. Network — to check requests and responses, copy the parameters of the root request through cURL using cURL–string conversion, and apply obtained details to your script.
2. Elements — to inspect trees of HTML elements on an internet page (text, tags, attributes). This concerns elements added dynamically via JavaScript. Data harvesting expert identifies the particular units and copies HTML selectors through the “Elements'' tab. Also, integrated DevTools search helps in finding the JS-based paths, understanding the order and specifics of dynamic content’s loading.
3. Sources — to detect target objects for further retrieval, including JSON objects. The limitations include dynamic content which can not be seen in the section but is available through HTTP clients.

Instead of using Chrome DevTools for a requests’ modification, one can leverage Postman as well.

5. Prefer API whenever possible

Discussion on what is better for scraping, API or HTML, is still in trend. The decision depends on the project specifics, as well as the choice, whether to buy residential IP pool access betting on the NAT technologies or strive for faster and more sustainable datacenter proxies.

API is usually faster and requires less data packets to send and receive for a result. So harvesting web information through API is preferable from the expert’s point of view.

6. Run two and more processes concurrently

First data mining phase brings raw HTML-formatted content which needs to be processed and converted to JSON output, convenient for further exploitation. Parsing here is an act of extracting needed info from HTML and includes two more stages:

1. Reading files
2. Using selectors to get only crucial pieces of knowledge.

Choosing a web parser, keep in mind that BeautifulSoup with CSS selectors suitable for most occasions. lxml with XPath does everything CSS selectors can and even more, which includes traversing up the HTML tree and the conditionals’ use.

Extract the publicly available insights and process them simultaneously. The Asyncio library in Python helps running a single parsing procedure and up to nine data collection moves simultaneously. Scraping experts focus on the following nuances:

• The best proxies for target sites support dynamic IP change through API methods and concurrent requests’ sending.
• Some processes may be stored in a buffer for further processing.
• Apply both external and internal queues to coordinate actions beyond single containers or environments. With the queue it is easier to monitor algorithms, and the choice of a queue system (e.g. RabbitMQ or Kafka) depends on the number of applied applications or services.

7. Use more ethical proxies 

Scraping experts buy residential and mobile proxies to distribute the load on servers and provide them with numerous unique IP addresses sending requests. The more original IPs are involved, the more information is available before the web page decides to refuse queries. Geo targeted proxies not banned by target sites provide actual knowledge on local context or metrics.

Ethical ecosystems for raising data analytics level strictly comply with AML and KYC policies to:

1. Assist in getting reliable and accurate info
2. Restrain from affecting target sites’ performance.

How to collect web data like a pro with Dexodata?

Extracting business insights from publicly available HTML content at scale requires preparation. True scraping experts are not only those who create the most sophisticated algorithms. They are those who comprehend that ethical proxies with AML and KYC compliance are the keys to maintaining the created scheme. Get a free proxy trial or buy residential IP addresses from the Dexodata platform to find a trusted companion and retrieve online insights with finesse and integrity.