By Mitch Rice
Web scraping is a method that many businesses use to collect information from different websites. It’s extremely useful to help businesses navigate their markets, discover opportunities and monitor competitors. While some businesses can collect enough data using a simple web scraper, others need large amounts of data that require special tools to scale their scraping efforts effectively. But how do you scale your data collection efforts safely and effectively?
In this article, we look closer at scaling web scraping efforts to collect larger amounts of data on a daily basis. We’ll also look at specialized tools, like a Telegram scraper and how proxies empower your scrapers, making it possible to collect large amounts of data.
Why Would You Scale Your Web Scraping?
There are many different reasons why a business might want to scale its web scraping efforts. However, it isn’t necessary for all businesses. If your company only uses web scraping to check the market or your competitors every few days, or if you don’t require a consistent flow of information, you won’t need to scale your efforts.
However, if your business relies on large amounts of data – for example, if you’re a business development company that assists with market research, you’ll need to be able to gain large amounts of data for various clients quickly. Alternatively, if you run an aggregator website like Agoda.com, Feedly, and Flipboard, you will need to have the most up-to-date and recent information available. This means continually collecting information to ensure everything remains relevant. In these types of situations, you’ll need to scale your data collection efforts to ensure you have the data you require at all times.
Benefits Of Scaling Web Scraping Efforts
There are numerous benefits to scaling your web scraping efforts. Some of these include:
- Access to more data
- Collected data is more accurate
- A faster way to collect information
- Data remains relevant and up-to-date
- Improves time-bound investments such as stocks
- Higher quality data
- More insights into the market and current trends
- Increased automation saves time and money
Challenges That Come With Scaling Web Scraping Efforts
There are quite a few challenges that come with scaling your web scraping efforts. Websites are implementing more anti-bot systems to keep their sites from being targeted by bots. If a website suspects your actions of being bot-driven, they’ll issue an IP ban keeping you from accessing the data on the website. When this happens, it can lead to inaccurate and incomplete data. When you have to collect large amounts of data, this can cause a significant issue in your data set.
When you scale your efforts, you also need to ensure that your chosen scraper is up to the task. They need to be able to collect information fast without placing too much strain on the websites they visit, and they’ll need to be able to bypass certain anti-bot measures such as CAPTCHAs. Choosing a powerful and reliable web scraping will be essential to scale your effort. Alternatively, you can also build your own, which will allow you to cater to your specific needs, but you have to bear in mind the maintenance required to keep it working efficiently.
Another issue faced by anyone trying to scale their web scraping efforts is proxy rotation. Managing and assigning proxies manually to each request is time-consuming and requires a lot of focus and organization. This can become a full-time job all on its own if you don’t find a way to adapt your proxy management system along with scaling your web harvesting efforts.
How To Overcome These Challenges
The easiest way to avoid these issues is to invest in the right tools. Make sure that you use a high-quality scraper that’s able to handle the volumes and requests you aim to send. Next, you’ll also need a reliable proxy provider that has the solutions you need. Proxy networks are great tools to use alongside scrapers as they empower the scraping tool.
For the scale at which you want to collect data, you’ll need a type of rotating proxy. These are residential proxies that automatically change the IP with each new request – making proxy management much easier. Having access to a large pool of IP addresses and concurrent threads makes scraping scalable.
These also come in more specialized versions, such as a Telegram scraper. A specialized Telegram scraper was specifically designed to access this platform, making it even easier to collect the information required at scale. It’s also already combined with a proxy to simplify the process.
Final Thoughts
Web scraping at scale can have many advantages and is a requirement for certain businesses. However, the challenges that come with scaling your efforts can sometimes seem daunting. With the right tools in place, you can efficiently scale your web scraping efforts without worrying about the challenges.
Data and information are provided for informational purposes only, and are not intended for investment, medical or other purposes.
