Recently, users have started employing better web scraping techniques, which lets them gain access to bigger and better data from public sources. One of these techniques is using a residential proxy. This helps web scrapers surf the extract data from the internet without the risk of getting their IP blocked.
Residential proxies mask the user’s IP with an actual mobile or desktop device IP instead of a public VPN or data center IP. As a result, the user can secretly extract data from websites while the website owners think of it as legit users. However, if any user’s IP gets flagged as a data scraper, big data websites such as Facebook will not allow them on their website. That’s where using a Facebook proxy from Smartproxy can help them out.
The art of web scraping
Web scraping artists have promoted the use of residential proxies. This is mainly due to their requirement to not get banned on certain websites if their IP address is flagged. Usually, web scrapers refrain from using their real IP address because it is registered in their name and can be tracked easily. Previously, web scrapers used public VPNs and datacenter proxies to do all of their scrapings. Still, the problem they faced was that numerous websites have slowly flagged almost every public VPN IP address and datacenter proxies. But, again, this is due to their free access to everyone.
Web scrapers start designing their personalized web scraper that takes input variables from the programmer and crawls through to the internet to extract the required information. The information is then parsed into a data set that gives it more structure, and the data becomes more useful for further analysis.
Numerous organizations use scraped datasets to evaluate customer reviews or ratings of their products or how their brand is being perceived on the internet. However, some organizations also use scraped data to upgrade/adjust their products to address a wider range of users or design new, better, stronger, and friendly products.
How much has web scraping evolved
Over the years, web scraping has evolved into an entire field of work. Numerous people are working daily to develop stronger web scrapers to crawl the internet better and extract accurate information. However, this is directly related to the demand for scraped data in the market.
To stay ahead in the competition, numerous organizations and businesses are joining the data scraping bandwagon. They are constantly developing variables that are sent to data scrapers to extract the required information. As a result, web scrapers are reporting a 300% increase in revenue due to their ability to provide higher quality data and faster data acquisition.
Web scrapers can extract information from Facebook as well by using a Facebook proxy. The proxy makes their web crawler appear legitimate to the security system deployed by Facebook and scrapes information from numerous pages to build a dataset. However, web scrapers want to scrape the internet without worrying about any blockades or be on the lookout for competitors tracking their movements. Therefore, they employ the use of residential proxies.
Why are web scrapers preferring residential proxies
The reason is simple; residential proxies provide better security, connectivity, and anonymity to web scrapers. These networks are at least 2000% larger than datacenter proxy networks. Therefore, web scrapers have a global reach and can penetrate global data markets, valued on the higher side of 36 billion USD.
Several web scrapers have considered moving to residential proxies as an investment for future revenue streams that they can attain from their global reach. Residential proxies also allow mass scraping as they constantly rotate IPs from the IP pool. This removes chances of the site owners recognizing that a web scraper is active and everybody is happy.
Residential proxies also have capabilities to unlock access to certain websites that the Government can restrict. Similarly, some websites have country-specific content on their website. Web scrapers can gain the IP address of the country of their choice to gain access to their desired specific data.
Web scrapers usually send large volumes of requests to their target website; if they do this from their IP address or use a public data center address, they might get flagged immediately. This is another reason web scrapers prefer rotating residential proxies as they make them appear as a different customer every time they send a request making them untraceable.
Scrapers can also send simultaneous requests to multiple websites that can extract larger amounts of data at the same time. Web scrapers can also deploy automation tools to help scrape data from the internet without any hassle.
Conclusion
Residential proxies are perfect for web scrapers due to their abilities of large-scale scraping, reliability, and anonymity. This makes scraping data from the internet easier and convenient to build larger datasets. However, general users can also use residential proxies to surf the internet anonymously and protect their identity and other data from getting scraped due to their presence on the internet.
