The development of information technologies over the last two years goes over the head of most internet users. Constantly growing numbers of automated bots and massive sources of public data seem endless, and manually visiting the page to read up and analyze potentially valuable knowledge is no longer an option. Not only is this process slow, but in a fast-paced and incredibly competitive digital world, the storage of public information on the web is better understood and analyzed with modern IT solutions. With the help of algorithmic automation, we can focus on giant data storages, eliminate the noise, and only fixate on the most valuable information that translates into knowledge for our desired use cases. And a web scraping API like ZenRows is a wonder for any company looking to extract big amounts of data.
While the web is full of public data and extracting it with automated tools is not illegal, the best sources of relevant information disapprove of unknown third parties targeting their web servers. Disobeying these restrictions can result in an IP ban that will sever your access to the website for an undisclosed amount of time. To battle this unjust information hoarding and the restricted access to it, we will discuss the usage of residential proxies - the most secure intermediary servers that will help us bypass these restrictions. In this article, you will receive a brief introduction to automated data extraction tools, and then we will focus on proxy servers that make this automated process a go-to approach to data acquisition for modern companies and business-minded individuals. We will also discuss location restrictions and why you need a Japan proxy to visit geo-blocked websites located in the country. To focus strictly on these servers, check out Smartproxy - our recommended jack-of-all-trades provider that will help you get a residential Japan proxy in no time!
How do I start web scraping?
To start web scraping, all you need is a good Python or other programming language tutorial to guide you along the way. With the help of the most popular coding languages, you can find pre-built scripts to copy or analyze for the creation of your first web scraper.
Web scrapers are usually separated into two segments - the simple automated data extractor and the parser. Extracting HTML code is by no means a hard task. You can complete the download yourself, but parsing is the part where the magic happens. With the help of powerful parsing libraries, the extracted pages and information contained within them get restructured into a readable and understandable data set. With the help of customizable filters, you can choose what information you prefer to focus on. For example, if all you care about is the pricing of particular products sold by your competitors, you can build more complex or buy pre-built scrapers to only get consistent updates on the pricing that interests you.
For smaller businesses that want fast results or business-minded individuals that have no time to learn the basic code of scraping scripts, we recommend purchasing no-code scrapers that achieve quick results through a comfortable graphical user interface (GUI).
Why residential proxies are the best for web scraping
While more expensive, residential proxies from top proxy industry suppliers are much more effective and ensure anonymity and security for your scraping tasks. Because their addresses are identities from real desktop and mobile devices, a higher quality data access ensures that the recipient server will hesitate to blacklist your IP after seeing that it is supplied by an internet service provider, unlike VPNs or data center proxies, which can be identified and blocked in interconnected bulks.
While there are many residential proxy lists, we recommend the informative proxy market research by Proxyway, which focuses on the most important performance metrics before diving into a deeper technical discussion to not overwhelm beginner readers and emphasize the most valuable strengths of the best residential proxy providers.
Data aggregators and other businesses that utilize web scraping from money increase their profits by 300% due to unrestricted access to the best quality public data and uninterrupted information acquisition. Residential proxies have a much higher quantity of trustworthy IP addresses, with their networks being at least 2,000% bigger than cheaper data center proxy pools.
Because most modern companies run their web scraping tasks or outsource them to experienced professionals, the internet is full of web scraping bots that only get better under the protection of proxy servers. With available addresses in most countries around the world, residential proxies are the key that helps automated web scrapers penetrate the global market valued at upwards of $36 billion.
If you are only learning about web scraping and proxy servers, maximize the available tools by testing your abilities on unprotected data sources before targeting retailers, search engines, social media platforms, and other targets of interest. Once you grasp the effectiveness of web scraping and apply the tools for your projects, you can start scaling up and begin extraction from sensitive pages with the help of residential proxies.
