Data Collection

Out of a dozen established social networking platforms, Twitter is one of the leaders. Politicians, comedians, musicians, athletes, and even big corporations commonly use it to network, share news, daily updates, promote a product or event, and so on. With so many participants in the network, the data you can find on Twitter can help you power your marketing strategy. So if you own a business, you should be interested in Twitter to keep up with the latest ...

The American company Amazon and its founder (the second richest and possibly the first most disliked person in the world) don’t need long introductions. Today Amazon is a giant in e-commerce, cloud storage, digital streaming, artificial intelligence, logistics, etc. We’ll focus on the e-commerce side of Amazon. Simply put, it’s the world’s leading online retailer. According to certain statistics, 90% of shoppers compare the price and quality of a product o...

Everybody likes watching videos. But not everybody knows how to unlock hidden content or how to use videos as a great alternative data source for research purposes. Luckily, a single dope platform is enough if you use the right tools. If you’re into videos, you probably know what Vimeo is. This  platform allows you to access high-quality video content without distracting ads. For viewers, it’s an entirely free platform; only the creators need to choose the...

Social media scraping can look like a tough nut to crack due to strong anti-bot systems. Gladly, it’s not a rule, at least in Telegram’s case. This platform supports various Telegram bot automation, making the scraping process easier.  There’re a lot of ready-built solutions for that, but you can easily make one yourself with a bit of coding and the Telegram API. Yes, this platform even has its own API! Dope, innit?

If you’ve ever gotten an ad for a bizarre product when scrolling through a news website, social media, or another online place, it was likely an item from AliExpress. They have both the most normal and the weirdest things on sale. AliExpress, Wish, Banggood, and similar international e-commerce platforms have been blasted in numerous outlets. The purchasing experience there can indeed be special. Often, the comedy revolves around these platforms selling an...

OK, OK. You prolly know it already, but let us remind ya. YouTube is a site that allows users to upload, watch, and interact with videos. Since 2005, it has become the MVP platform for various things – starting from storing fav clips or songs and ending with marketing for companies to promote their products. Hundreds of hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It means it’s impossible to scrape the search results manually, well, unless you're...

Today Instagram isn’t the newest or the hippest, but still remains one of the top social networking services as around 500 million people are actively using it daily. However, it’s arguably not as fast-paced as TikTok while being more captivating than Facebook. Such a balance means that Instagram can be a perfect place to find an audience of young adults (or millennials, if you will). Whether you’re part of a corporate team or a solo hustler, a business wi...

Have you ever wondered how much Mozart could earn if he had lived in our times? If he were alive now, he could collect a stack of money from music royalties alone.  Creating music doesn't end up with finishing a song, finding a way to spread it to the world, and then sitting peacefully while earning your pennies. Music creation is a serious business that has its own monetization and commercialization methods. One of them comes from royalty payments.

A widely available internet leaves the door open for people to find information about everything. For example, everyone can check a business's online presence before trusting it. So, everything that could be found online about your brand helps your potential audience evaluate if you’re legit. Statistics only prove that – 9 out of 10 online shoppers admit that reviews influence their buying decisions. It stands to reason – checking unbiased opinions helps a...

Information keeps the world spinning as more people continue to spend their time online. By buzzing in the digital world, we keep generating more useful information, which can be collected and analyzed.  Different informational units and formats are spawned every second, so the data analysis becomes more rock’n’roll, making the collection process less determined. In fact, everything can be gathered and analyzed, from the strictly formatted spreadsheets to ...

Public data scraping is becoming a hot topic, and our talented devs cannot just sit back and relax. So, they took on a challenge and presented FOUR(!) powerful tools designed to harvest all sorts of web data.  How does getting real-time data from any corner of the world at a 100% success rate sound for you? If we got your attention, let's say you've already found your partner in the scraping game. Now you only need to pick your fighter (ekhm, Scraping API)...

If you are a software engineer, you’ve probably heard those two words many times. If not, don’t worry, we will explain the logic behind them as applying concurrency and parallelism may level up your programming journey. Concurrency and parallelism are closely related to multitasking. And what do we usually do during trips? We keep checking the map, maintaining a conversation with passengers, thinking if we packed everything we needed, and even dealing with...

More companies are full of zeal and zest about automated and cloud-based solutions than ever before. The enthusiasm especially revolves around topics related to data management strategy. As a result, Data as a Service has become a popular choice among startups and other businesses dealing with data integrations, storage, and analytics processes.

No matter what industry you may belong to, your customers are an inseparable part of your business. Feedback from them can be an extremely valuable resource that, if dealt with right, can bring both benefit and efficiency. But how do we sift through, measure, analyze, and draw conclusions from feedback?  I mean, at Smartproxy, we, too, take our time to understand our customer base and their needs. Without it, we wouldn’t be much of a business. So, what is ...

Drum roll round, please! SERP Scraping API starts a free trial! Sometimes you gotta check a thing without buying one. With this free trial, you’ll get 3k requests for 3 days straight to test if this tool is your jam. After the free trial ends, you’ll be automatically charged for a Lite subscription plan. If you feel that it isn’t what you were looking for, don’t forget to cancel the free trial before the end of it!

It probably wouldn't be too bold to state that data-driven decisions rule the world. Gathering big data can open up crucial insights to improve your business strategy and activities. A massive amount of data is out there, and its growth is nowhere near the finish line. It's expected there will be 63 zettabytes of data floating on the internet by 2025. We’re talking about 21 zeros here – an unfathomable amount of data.  The good news is that this enormous l...

Data is the new oil, which helps drive businesses and make better-informed decisions. For a long time, companies relied on traditional data (usually gathered internally or from official sources) to predict overall market trends, analyze competitors, and understand customer behavior.  However, alternative data has become the new cool, which can aid almost any business, investors, financial institutions, or just simple people like you and me. And with proper...

What do you usually do when a specific question or product pops into your mind, and you need a quick answer? You probably type it on Google and select one of the top results. Looking at this from a business perspective, you probably want to know how Google algorithms picked those top-ranking pages since being one of them attracts more traffic. The result pages of the largest search engine in the world are an excellent source for competitors’ and market res...

The world of cybersecurity is evolving daily. With every great technological advancement comes a need to control and protect it from abuse. One of the main countermeasures against cybercriminals is none other than honeypots. Since its first use in the early 90s, honeypots have proven to be extremely helpful in catching hackers and improving overall security.  They’re great, but when we talk about collecting massive amounts of publicly available data, honey...

So, you’ve found yourself in need of some images, but looking for them individually doesn’t seem all that exciting? Especially if you are doing it for a machine learning project. Fret not; web scraping comes in to save the day as it allows you to collect massive amounts of data in a fraction of the time it would take you to do it manually.  There are quite a few tutorials out there, but in this one, we’ll show you how to get the images you need from a stat...

Web scraping is on the rise these days. We’re not just talking about tech people who have specialized knowledge. People of all backgrounds turn to web scraping as a way to improve various aspects of their work. From SEO specialists, sneakerheads, freelance social media managers to small and big online business owners.  Having access to publicly available data can help you make valuable decisions for work, research, and even just daily life. But what if you...

Got stuck with the annoying proxy error codes? Chances are that you ended up with undesirable 404, 407, or 503 status codes at least once, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. But it may seem frustrating only from the first glance – a better understanding of what you are dealing with helps find the solution quickly. Think this: the idea of the status code is to indicate the problem, so you won't need to.

Psst! Come closer to hear a secret: collecting publicly accessible data can skyrocket your business to the next level. If you unlock and gather valuable info, you can easily monitor brand reputation, compare prices, test links, analyze competitors, and much more. While the benefits sound legit, collecting data manually can quickly become a pain in the neck. But what if we told you that it’s possible to enjoy all the advantages without any need to sweat? Wi...

The internet has changed quite a bit, hasn't it? Today, almost every popular website you go to is tailored to your specific needs. The goal is to make the user experience as good as possible. It sounds amazing for the end-user, but for someone who’s trying to web scrape dynamic content, it can prove to be quite the challenge. That doesn’t mean it’s not doable!  In this blog post, we’ll go through a step-by-step guide on how to web scrape dynamic content wi...

The internet is more than just the information superhighway. It’s also a vast ocean of all sorts of data. Regardless of your industry and needs, this ocean is full of details that can help you gain an advantage over competitors or dig out some helpful info. Market research, lead generation, keyword analysis, business insights – it all sounds nice, but how can you actually use them for your needs? To answer that, we’ve collected the best-performing web scra...

Google has become a gateway to easily-accessible information. And one of the best ways to make use of Google’s limitless knowledge is web scraping. We’ve just released a detailed blog post about scraping Google SERPs with Python, where we cover lots of useful info, including the technical part. So before you dive into this tutorial – check it out. But what if Python is not exactly your forte? This blog post will show you how to scrape SERPs using a simpl...

Whenever you want to find an answer to a tricky question or dig out some advice, who (or what) do you approach first? Let’s be honest, it’s Google. Market research, competitor analysis, latest news, exclusive deals on designer clothing – whichever you’re after, 9 times out of 10, you’ll google it. Being the richest encyclopedia in the world, Google is also the most protective of all search engines, so extracting data from it can be pretty hellish. On the b...

If you're fresh-new to web scraping, you may not be familiar with selectors yet. Let us introduce ya – selectors are objects that find and return web items on a page. These pieces are an essential part of a scraper, as they affect your tests' outcome, efficiency, and speed. Yep, understanding the idea of a selector isn't that complicated. Finding the right selector itself might be. To be honest, even the two languages that define them, XPath and CSS, have ...

OK, let’s be honest. There's no secret that some websites hold a huge amount of precious data, such as pricing and product details, content, consumer sentiment, and much more. Accessing such data is extra useful for marketing and research purposes. And boy, oh boy, can it skyrocket your business to the next level.

Businesses collect scads of data for a variety of reasons: email address gathering, competitor analysis, social media management – you name it. Scraping the web using Python libraries like Scrapy, Requests, and Selenium or, occasionally, the Node.js Puppeteer library has become the norm. But what do you do when you bump into the iron shield of anti-scraping tools while gathering data with Python or Node.js? If not too many ideas flash across your mind, thi...

Web scraping has various uses and can be a huge time saver. It’s helped to start and run many businesses with best llc services, collect data for research, or simply automate boring menial work. But if you’re looking to get into web scraping, you’ll often find it presented as some abstract rocket science. Market research, alternative data, business insights? Sounds nice – but how the heck do I apply that for my needs?  Our friends at Smartproxy asked us (t...

Let’s be honest, a headless browser sounds, to say the least, peculiar if you haven’t heard the term before. C’mon, how can your good ol’ Chrome or Firefox be headless? Yup, it’s mind-boggling, but before you deep dive into that philosophical void (seriously, try not to do this to yourself), let’s answer this question in technical terms.