You may scrape without proxies using some tools that you can access from your desktop or from a web server. You can perform small-scale data scraping such as scraping data from URLs using some tools instead of using proxies as they are slower and incur additional costs. Let’s look at some of the methods to scrape data without proxies.
You can make use of your own IP address using a scraping tool without the target website blocking it. However, if a website identifies that you are scraping data from their website, they will blacklist your IP, which makes it inaccessible to collect further data using the same IP address.
Also, the business program webpages to block spiders and crawlers to optimize the server load. When you scrape using your own IP address, you appear more human and can avoid the target website blocking you.
Tor has around 20,000 IP addresses to use to mask your real IP address but all these are marked and the sources are identifiable. If you use an IP address from the Tor network to scrape the website and the website, it identifies you in turn, then it results in the website blocking the exit nodes of the Tor network. When a website blocks the Tor network’s IP address, it prevents other Tor users from accessing the website.
The disadvantage of using these tools is that they can slow the process because they pass traffic through multiple different nodes before reaching a website. The website may also block IP addresses if it detects multiple requests from a single IP address.
Most browsers allow you to rotate your user agent. You can create a list of user-agent strings with different browser types from popular browsers to imitate well-known crawlers like Googlebot. You can also use a tool to automatically change your user agent and collect the same data as Google crawls a website.
Websites cannot detect headless browsers during web scraping and they automate the process through a command-line interface. They don’t require the web pages to load during crawling and can crawl more pages at the same time.
The only disadvantage is that these browsers consume RAM, CPU, and bandwidth. It is suitable to use the headless browser only when the CPU resources are high. Headless browsers require Javascripts for scraping the web content that is otherwise not accessible through a server’s raw HTML response.
A new IP address is allotted for every new request from a user. The websites have difficulty detecting or blocking the proxy as it changes the IP address frequently.
When you use a rotating proxy for web scraping, the internet service provider (ISP) provides a new IP address from the pool of IP addresses. The advantage of using a rotating proxy is that the ISPs have more IP addresses than the users connected to them.
It distributes the next available IP address for the proxy to connect. The IP address is put back into the pool for the next user, when a user disconnects, it takes and puts it back in the. The server will rotate IPs from the pool for all the concurrent connection requests sent to it.
The user can also set the frequency of rotating the IP addresses with a sticky session or sticky IP. And maintain the same IP address until they complete a task. A sticky session will maintain the proxy with the same IP address until you finish scraping.
To accomplish this, go to the Google search engine and type the word or the name of the website. From the results, take the page that you want to scrape. Click on the three dots near the title of the page, and you can see the button “Cached.” Then, click on it, and you can see the cached page immediately.
You can get the latest updates that are done as recently as a few hours ago on the site as Google crawls regularly. The screenshot below shows an example of the results shown by Google and you can see the three dots next to the title.
After you click on the three dots, you get this page from where you can get the cached data.
Scrape Data with Dynamic Web Queries
It is an easy and efficient scraping method to set the data feed from an external website into a spreadsheet. The dynamic web queries feed the latest data from the websites regularly. It’s not just a one-time static operation and that’s why it is called dynamic. The process to do it is as follows:
Web scraping involves scraping product details, prices, and new product launches from the competitor’s websites. The challenge is to scrape data without websites blocking you. If you are performing a small-scale scraping, then you can use any of the methods mentioned above. Small-scale scraping includes mining some structured information such as discovering hyperlinks between documents.
