The history of ethical web scraping via rotating proxies
Contents of article:
- How did geo targeted proxies appear?
- What are the latest web scraping trends?
- When did the history of web scraping start?
- The landmarks in history of web data collection
- How is web data collection evolving in 2023?
The internet in 2023 is a truly global space which unites more than 5 billion users. Despite the location or time of the day, at least two of three Earth inhabitants are online all the time, emphasizes Statista. Satellite internet developed by the SpaceX Starlink program and its analogues have made broadband connections over the globe available as never before.
Such a large online community creates terabytes of content every second. This knowledge can be obtained and applied for business needs. The enterprise data gathering infrastructure Dexodata offers to buy rotating proxies, capable of improving the procedure and results of such data collection.
It was not always so that gathering online insight is the basic need for business development along with keeping trade secrets from unethical data collection and leverage. Residential proxy rotating its IP addresses serves as an indispensable tool for these purposes. Such services appeared relatively not long ago. Today we invite you to join us in the journey across the history pages of web harvesting.
How did geo targeted proxies appear?
The initial point in the internet history is August 23, 1991. On that day, CERN engineer Tim Berners-Lee publicly announced the World Wide Web technology, WWW. It has numerous distinctive features that shaped the current state of the online sphere and modern rotating proxies in particular. These are:
- HTTP, serving for delivering information from distant end-users to servers, and back. Nowadays UDP-based HTTP/3 protocol is considered to be a future platform for the whole global network
- HTML, the language structuring web pages, now functioning with CSS
- URLs, hyperlinks that serve as bridges between the sites’ sections and scattered services. When you buy rotating proxy for business intelligence and start searching for detailed insight, you need lists of URLs leading to the desired content.
This infrastructure is still functional regardless of different performance improvements, such as NAT technology addressing the problem of missing IPv4 addresses.
Another serious internet issue is the safety of private information. As we stated in our previous historical guide, first trusted proxy websites have appeared and evolved as an answer to the intention to keep online crooks away from sensitive data.
What are the latest web scraping trends?
Intermediary servers assist in:
- Distributing load between multiple nodes
- Maintaining SEO and SMM campaigns
- Enhancing cybersecurity
- Collecting precise insight at scale.
The problem of extracting private info is nowadays regulated by the local laws. In the US there is the American Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) containing the definition of online hacking and related terms. A US appeals court stated with reliance on that Act that ethical information harvesting concerns only publicly available data. Trial is still in process, but the most trusted proxy websites, such as Dexodata, support this decision. We ensure strict AML compliance and KYC policies for performing ethical internet data collection, and thus we support the latest web scraping trends.
When did the history of web scraping start?
WWW was not only a computing network, but also a title of the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, with the absence of spaces. Its creation also belongs to Tim Berners-Lee. The invention was announced in 1991.
It took two years after surfing appeared to make the first step to acquiring info online at scale. And one more year to display online images among the text symbols, the Mosaic browser was capable of doing it in 1994. There were no possibilities to buy proxy rotating IP addresses back then.
1993 has become the year when the first web crawling technology was invented. First, software called Wanderer has measured the size of the world network by enumerating available resources. Then JumpStation technology appeared and became a crawler-driven search engine.
The first online crawler-based data collection tools were designed in 1996. They were called WebBot and WebCrawler and both of them could acquire data contained in the sites’ HTML code. And that was the beginning of the insights’ gathering history.
The landmarks in history of web data collection
Engineers had been improving technologies for the next few years. Today anyone can test rotating proxies, buy them and apply to chosen software, including AI-driven tools. The chaining technology was popular at the time. Every middlebox IP served as a link in the connection chain, and transferred packets of bytes there and back.
Netscape Communications introduced the first residential rotating IP in 1996. JavaScript-driven Proxy Auto-Configuration file (PAC) has included the list of available hosts and rules for connecting through them to the required URLs.
The next milestones in the development of info harvesting solutions were characterized by the appearance of:
- 2000 – Web API (Application Programming Interface), responsible for simplified requests exchange between third-party applications and services
- 2001 – Framework running on open source principles and offline browser suits for downloading HTML pages
- 2003 – XPath, expression language that preceded XML format and accelerated the creation of automated mining tools with rotational residential proxies
- 2004 – Python-written library with algorithms that are most frequently used for obtaining online information
- 2006 – Acquiring online insights became available without coding skills due to visual structuring of the source page’s HTML code. In 2023 AI-driven LLM models like ChatGPT have simplified automation of big data harvesting even more
- 2008 – Automated web scraping tool
- 2009 – Cloud-based solutions
- 2015 – AI-based software for web info collection
- 2018 - Application of machine learning to increase the scale of collecting, verifying, and processing insight.
Timeline of ethical web data collection
How is web data collection evolving in 2023?
Artificial intelligence sets the tone for the whole industry development. Trusted proxy websites serve for data fetching in e-commerce, SEO, ads verification, monitoring current metrics, and forecasting future trends. Individuals and enterprises are welcomed to get a free trial of any residential, datacenter, mobile rotating proxy. Then buy one address or a pool of dynamic IPs for a reasonable price on Dexodata.
