If you are here, you are probably doing one of three things: collecting public web data, scaling a crawler, or debugging a scraper that suddenly went from “working fine” …
I’ve been building and breaking APIs for the better part of a decade. First as a backend engineer at a fintech startup where a single unthrottled webhook took down …
I want to start this guide with something most parsing tutorials skip: a confession. When I first learned web scraping, I thought parsing was the hard part. CSS selectors, …
Every scraping tutorial I’ve ever read opens the same way: “A User-Agent is a string sent by your browser…” and then dumps a list of UAs from 2019 that, …
The first time I ran into fingerprinting, I did not know it had a name. I had a Python scraper that worked beautifully against a target site for about …
The first time I bought residential proxies, I spent two days figuring out why they were three times slower than the datacenter proxies I had been using, and another …
I still remember the first time I watched a headless browser pull data from a JavaScript-heavy site that had been stonewalling my Requests-based scraper for weeks. It felt like …
I have built scrapers in all three of these tools, and I have rewritten projects from one into another more than once. That experience left me with strong opinions, …
If you have been scraping the web for any length of time, you have probably bumped into ScrapingBee. It is one of the more established names in the space, …
The first scraper I ever built was a mess. It was a Python script that hit an e-commerce site once a minute, broke every other day, and got my …