Web Scraping is a gathering of useful information from a website of interest and presenting it in meaningful way. Using this technique makes it easier to gather information automatically to ensure that what’s collected from dynamically changing websites is synchronized with the time the scraping is done.

So is it legal or illegal? Web scraping and crawling aren’t illegal by themselves. After all, you could scrape or crawl your own website, without a hitch. There are no federal laws against web scraping in the United States or in any other counties as long as the scraped data is publicly available and the scraping activity does not harm the website being scraped.  

• Find the URL that you want to scrape.
• Find the data you want to extract.
• Write the code
• Run the code and extract the data
• Store the data in a required format.

It may sound very easy but it is not a simple task. Websites come in many shapes and forms, as a result, web scrapers vary in functionality and features. You may encounter some issues like blockades or captchas so you start reading some guidelines on how to avoid and bypass these security measures.

If you are a programmer you need to understand the website you are scraping. What kind of security setup does it have? Can the website detect bots easily? Do they have captcha? Do they show different contents based on location (geo-targeting)? There are so many things to consider for this line of job. The are limits on how long you can scrape a website so one solution is to use a proxy service.

Basically, it is a proxy that allows you to scrape any websites anonymously. It is an intermediary server which comes between you and the website you want to access. While using the proxy, the internet traffic you initiated will pass through the proxy server and then to the destination website. A proxy server provides different levels of security, functions and privacy depending on what you need. It is also very important to use proxy because websites can block your IP while performing web scraping and once you’re blocked, you won’t be able to scrape the website anymore.

Bright Data

Bright Data has a very reliable and secured proxy infrastructure that contains 4 proxy types namely Data Center Proxies, Residential Proxies, ISP Proxies and Mobile Proxies. Depending on your needs they have the IPs for you. Their data center proxies can provide you static IPs from various data centers all over the world and the residential proxies have 72+ million real device IPs from every country and city. IPS Proxies with static IPs from internet service provides network and with mobile proxies from IPs from 3G and 4G network of real mobile devices.

This provider has a tool called Web Unlocker. It is a powerful tool which lets you reach the toughest target sites with unprecedented success rates. This suites for customers who want to automate their proxy management, yet maintain control of their data collection operation. Its uses machine learning technology to elevate performance with each request. The user would only need to simply send the request and get the most accurate data available, while the unlocking process is done behind the scene.

Another great tool of this provider is the Search Engine Crawler. This tool can get real user search results, for any keyword, on every search engine. This tool is designed to collect data from search engines like google. It imitates real users using real devices and allows to get a full, global understanding of any keyword results on any major search engine. Types of data can be collected includes: Websites, images, shopping, maps, videos and hotel data. The key features of this tool are as follows:

• •  Works with all major search engines
  • Laser-Focused Geo-Targeting
  • Imitates real users on real devices
  • Can be customized
  • Extremely Quick (Under 3s)

OxyLabs

Oxylabs is one of the leading companies in the proxy and web scraping industry. They ensure the highest business ethic standards lead all of their operations. This provider offers Proxies and Scraper APIs such as Data Center Proxies, Residential Proxies and Next-Gen Residential proxies (which has an AI and Machine Learning based solution for efficient web scraping). They have over 100M+ ethically sourced residential proxy pools.

They have APIs too for SERP (scalable SERP data delivery from major search engines), E-Commerce (enterprise-level data from most e-commerce websites) and Web Scraper (public data delivery from a majority of websites).

ZenRows

ZenRows collects content from any website with a simple call. It handles rotating proxies, headless browsers and CAPTCHAs.

ZenRows bypass any anti-bot or blocking system to help you obtain the info you are looking for. For that, it includes several options such as Javascript Rendering and Premium Proxies. There is also the autoparse option for the most popular websites that will return structured data automatically. It will convert unstructured content into structured data (JSON output), with no code necessary.

ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs, so you can get the HTML from any web page with a simple API call. This api is very easy to use, you simply send ScraperAPI the URL you want to scrape and it will return the HTML response. Letting you focus on the data, not proxies. With its anti-bot detection and bypassing built in, you never need to worry about having your requests blocked. It is fast and reliable and built for scale. Whether you need to scrape 1000 pages per month or 1 million pages per month, ScraperAPI can you give the scale you need.

HydraProxy

HydraProxy has high-quality and undetectable proxies for sensitive applications. They have over 5M+ IPs, Residential and 4G networks with granular control which means you have full control over the protocol, network type, and location of your proxies. HydraProxy has an application called HydraHeaders which controls multiple browser profiles simultaneously, emulates devices and avoids detection, and proxy manager for enhanced privacy. With the Enhance Privacy feature, it saves your proxies in a matter of seconds and uses them as your gateway to the internet. Both SOCKS5 and HTTP/S protocols are supported.