Because of how effective it is in gathering up market data, web scraping has now become a major industry all of its own. In order to do any sort of sophisticated data gathering, a web scraping proxy is required. If you are interested in using one, then go to zenscrape for a residential proxy, where you can get fast and global residential proxies that work to let you get around captchas and fully unlock the full potential of the Internet. 

When an API isn’t available

Although some data resources that are open up to the general public can be accessed via an API, there are some that actively try and keep it all to themselves. In addition to this, many businesses out there purposely fence off their data to the general public. 

Because of this, the only option pretty much left then is to conduct the process of screen scraping. As part of this, a user agent gains access to a website(s) and automatically extracts the important data that is on there. This is typically done on a large scale in order to gather up full databases of information. 

In order to make this process both undetectable and highly scalable, web scrapers require the use of a either a proxy server or large proxy list. With these in place, it makes each scrape of a website look completely unique, as not to give away their true intentions. 

Various uses for web scraping

There are a large number of applications for which proxy networks for web scraping can be used for. Even though each individual scrape of a website is for a unique reason or to retrieve a unique set of data, the underlying purpose is pretty much always the same – to be undetected, anonymous, and fast. 

Data providers and sales teams are using residential proxy networks for the purpose of scraping pricing information, real estate listings, ticket data, contact information, flight data, website changes, product releases, product reviews, competitor prices, online rankings and reputation, and weather data.

Protection from IP cloaking

Using a proxy is a great way of not only cloaking but also blocking an IP, although not all of them are the same. For example, a data centre proxy is highly vulnerable to cloaking as they use a shared subnetwork from the data center’s central server. For this reason, the only viable and completely secure proxy for the purposes of web scraping is a residential proxy. This is because with it not sharing a subnetwork, there is no way in which it can be blocked. For the purpose of IP masking, residential proxies are the perfect solution.

Web scrapers are not able to continually gain access to a server as many times as it wants. Doing this will result in your IP address and perhaps your entire network being banned from ever accessing their server again. This is where IP masking comes in and helps you, as their server will not recognise the web scrapes are coming from the same IP.