To start with, web scraping allows individuals and businesses to collect web data in an automated fashion for various purposes. Users can perform tasks like news monitoring, price monitoring, price intelligence, lead generation, and most importantly, market research. These cases help the end-users to make smarter decisions for their new or ongoing ventures.
However, performing scraping across the web can be throttled as multiple users request for the same IP address at the same time. On a good note, a proxy rotator ensures successful data extraction. With the help of this article, we will help you to demonstrate a rotating proxy python to enhance your web scraping activity
- Pre-requisites for a proxy rotator
- HTTPS Proxies – We will refer to https://sslproxies.org/ to get some free HTTPS proxies. This site has a tremendous list of IP addresses with corresponding port numbers to make proxy request calls. It helps to hide your real IP address, and you can choose a proxy from another website.
- Random – Python library plays a vital role in accessing the random choice of proxies. To include it in our project, we’ll import it from the python libraries and use its choice
- Requests – HTTP requests will be made by using the python library and importing it to our project. In case of non-availability of the library in your Python environment, refer to this command to install it: pip install requests.
- Python library – We’ll put the Beautiful Soup Python library into use for a free list of proxies. You need to run this command: pip install beautifulsoup4.
How to improve your Web Scraping Speed
The only way to scrap the data successfully is to do it quietly and quickly. Let’s take a look at some tips on how to speed up web scraping operation:
Reduce the request size
To retrieve varying data from a page, a user should send a separate request to the website. But it doesn’t matter for a small amount of data. For more efficiency, it is advisable to download the source code for scraping, and use it for offline data mining. All you need to do is to send the request to the website. For non-friendly scrapers, it is hard to detect your existence.
Put down the data to CSV after each scraping.
Any unforeseen glitch such as an unreliable connection, clash of hardware or software, and others can block your data extraction job. There is the possibility that you may lose your garnered data, and we understand how frustrating it can be.
Jot down every record to the CSV to avoid loss due to any of the above-mentioned annoying consequences. Even if your session gets expired, you can continue from where you left. There is no need to access the already scraped things,
Make use of API
Websites like Twitter have API. We would recommend using the websites with API for web scraping purposes. API comes with its advantages and allows you to code your crawler more effectively and efficiently.
Prefer to Crawl Google’s Caches
To access the data from minute to minute, you must scrape the website data live. You need to give a thought about scraping the version of the page cached by Google if its data source is not frequently updated. Such a move will fasten web scraping and won’t annoy the website owners who are against scraping techniques.
Go for a reliable Proxy Service Provider
Most importantly, you must own a reliable Proxy Service Provider for a successful scraping. Not all proxy providers provide reliable services, some are good at-promise you the best but leave you disappointed in the end. It is advisable to go for a rotating residential proxy to avoid any glitches.
This proxy type rotates its IP address for each request made that is undetectable and helps you mask your IP address which is important for successful scraping. To speed up the web scraping, you should go for a proxy pool with unlimited parallel connections.
In a nutshell, owning a reliable proxy service provider is essential for the smooth functioning of the scraping process. You require a parallel proxy connection along with an automated IP rotator for fast IP address switching.
