Differences between web crawling/web scraping | onlineproxy.io

Web scraping basically boils down to extracting data from websites, and this process is automated through bots that gather website data. The scraping process involves data locating and extracting techniques. This system can scrape data from anywhere and is not limited to the web.

Web crawling vs. web scraping of web pages the main differences

Web scraping allows you to extract content or any kind of data from any website. This system copies pixels on the screen and an underlying HTML code alongside data from a database. Using this method, you can replicate the whole webpage if you need to. This automated process is also known as web harvesting or web data extraction. It fetches a web page. Web crawling is regarded as the central part of scraping since it downloads pages for further usage.

Web scrapers gather specific info from some web page; if you need to find out about prices on websites such as Amazon or any other e-commerce platforms, you can do it with a little help from web scraping.

To draw a comparison with web crawling. This term comes from crawlers of search engines. Web crawlers scan the whole internet to index websites. Google or Bing use their own web crawlers.

Big data analytics, machine learning specialists also take to web crawling sometimes. A web crawler or a web spider is a bot that constantly scans websites, searching for content and indexing web pages.

Online crawlers and web scrapers gather specific data. Web crawlers get a copy of websites, and scrapers collect specific data for further analysis.

When organizations do scraping, they, first of all, get some web crawling solution and find the information they need. To some extent, data crawling involves web scraping, like gathering keywords, images, and links.

But most of the time, web crawling is the prerogative of Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the like. These bots search for specific info about websites, whereas web scraping programs target websites from some particular areas like e-commerce or stock markets.

Do you need proxies for web scraping?

Proxy management is an essential thing for any web scraping efforts. In this article, we will tell you about the crucial aspects of proxies used for web scraping.

First of all, you need to find more information about IP addresses and the way they work.

An IP address is a number that consists of digits, every device connected to the internet has this number.

Proxies are third-party servers that make it possible for users to process the requests of users adding their own IPs. Thus, when you visit some website, it sees a proxy IP address, not your real one. And this mechanism allows you to scrape the web without exposing your real location.

When you use a proxy, you can crawl a website more efficiently. In this way, you minimize the possibility of your spider being banned. Proxies allow making web requests from any location in the whole world or from any device, and there are mobile residential mobile proxy servers, as you might know. When you scrape data from e-commerce websites, this comes in handy. Proxies also allow you to make much more requests to a target site.

If you wonder how to use proxies for web scraping, we'll tell you about it. You'd better use a pool of proxies to direct your requests via them. This thing allows you to split traffic between a number of proxies:

• How big your proxy pool is, depends on a few reasons.
• How many requests are made during an hour?
• The level of protection from bots of the particular website.
• The type of your IP addresses public proxies, residential mobile proxies, or datacenter ones.

It's fair to say that the latter is a lower-quality option compared to mobile residential proxies. All these aspects impact how good your proxy pool actually is. Frequently, users find that without a proper configuration of their proxy pools, some of the IPs that get banned are no longer available for accessing websites.

Do you need proxy servers for web crawling?

After researching the information about your proxy options, you might have realized that it's not easy to grasp the topic. Lots of providers of proxies shout from the rooftops how great their proxies are and don't give much explanation why it actually is.

So it isn't easy to decide which proxy providers are the best for your crawling web project. We've gathered some info on this topic for you and presented it in the form of an easy-to-digest summary. There are fundamental differences between IPs. Proxy server acts as a third-party IP address that allows you to assign to your web request a different address, though there are different types of IPs you can use. Each one has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Public IPs

Public IPs are of a low quality. Websites block them pretty quickly. What's more, these proxies are often infected with malware. So, you use these proxies at the risk of spreading malware, let alone installing viruses on your own device.

Mobile proxies

These are IP addresses of private mobile devices. It's not as easy to acquire them as you can imagine. This is quite an expensive option.

Mobile residential proxies of the OnlineProxy company are working fast. They connect to mobile carriers allowing them to get a high level of anonymity and trust. IP addresses are changing at every request after a certain time. Mobile proxies come without bans almost 100% of the time. Because of using IP addresses of mobile carriers, the risk of being banned remains minimal because websites that you request see you as a natural person, not a bot. You can proxy buy as well as residential IP phones at the OnlineProxy website.

Proxies of OnlineProxy are a perfect choice for web crawling or web scraping. Purchase residential proxies are always helpful to unblock proxy websites. OnlineProxy always has a fresh proxy list.

Datacenter IP addresses

This type of proxy address is the most widespread. Those are the IPs of servers provided by the data center. They are pretty cheap, and if everything is done right, you can get an effective solution for your web crawling projects.

Using proxy servers for web scraping and web crawling

If you are searching for a solution for your scrapping or scrawling project, usually it's not enough to buy a list of proxies hoping to bypass restrictions from websites. They won't last long since websites ban them and don't allow them to gather valuable data.

When managing your proxy pool, you may face some challenges:

• Your proxies should have an option of identifying various kinds of bans so that you can fix the issues like redirects, bans, captchas, and so forth.
• When your proxies run into errors like bans and timeouts, they need to be substituted with others.
• For some scraping projects, you need to keep sessions with the same proxy. That's why you need to configure your existing pool of IPs accordingly.
• Geotargeting option. In some cases, you need to set your pool of proxies so as to use only specific proxies for some websites.

There's no doubt as to whether you need to use proxy servers or not. The usage of proxies increases with every new day. People use it for their web scraping/crawling projects free as well as paid proxies. Mobile proxy servers are the most appropriate option on the market that suits most of the projects hiding the user's real location. Site unblock proxy might be an option to access some websites.