Most of web scraping is relatively simple: retrieve HTML pages and parse the data out of them. However modern web scraping can be much more complex and in this article we'll take a look at web scraping APIs and how they can make scraping easier.
Web Scraping APIs are software as a service (SaaS) products that solve common scraping problems so the developers can focus on creating their web scraping powered products. Let's take a look at what are these problems.
Bypass web scraping blocking
When web scraping, a major challenge is website blocking, which denies the requests and responds with status codes like 403 and 429, preventing retrieval of the desired web page data.
In a nutshell, bypassing web scraping blocking requires solving two main challenges.
When extracting data using known web scraping tools, the target website can detect the client as a bot and either block the request or prompt a CAPTCHA challenge.
While it's possible to make your scraper undetected any website can keep track and analyse the IP addresses of the incoming requests. Eventually, every scraper needs proxies to scrape at scale.
The above challenges require an in-depth understanding of anti-fingerprinting techniques and expensive proxy pools making it an expensive problem to solve in both dev time and costs.
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Can existing open-source tools be used for bypassing scraper blocking?
In short, yes. There are many brilliant tools available for web scraping like the trending curl-cffi tool.
That being said, web scraping blocking is a very fast-moving subject making it very difficult to keep up with these tools.
Any open-source bypass techniques are quickly discovered by anti-bot creators and are patched. This makes it very difficult to keep up and results in an endless cat-and-mouse game.
On the other hand, a web scraping API can be continuously updated with the required logic for bypassing blocking and is really the only worry-free way to access web scraping without blocking.
Saving costs
A considerable part of web scraping APIs' costs comes from proxies, which are essential for scaling. While high-quality proxies can be expensive, they prove to be cost-effective when used in the context of a web scraper API.
Web scraping services follow the API credits pricing model, which is reasonable for the following reasons:
- Credits are billed individually per request.
- API credit costs aren't fixed but are prone to the used configuration.
- It provides a clear estimation of the total project costs, as the required API credits can be easily predicted.
Based on the above details, we can conclude that using a web scraper API is relatively cheaper than the development hours needed!
Check out our benchmarks table for the cost estimation of scraping the most popular targets and anti-bot systems.
Convenience shortcuts
A web scraping API offers various features for efficient data extraction, including:
- Auto parsing.
- Auto concurrency and scaling.
- Headless browser automation frameworks.
- Finetuning and retrying logic.
- Automatic request configuration.
- A comprehensive proxy pool in different locations.
Creating a system with the above features requires a complex managed infrastructure which is simply not accessible to smaller teams.
The feature set provided by web scraping APIs can save not only a lot of development time but major infrastructure costs.
FAQ
How to choose the right web scraping API?
Choosing the right web scraping API can be difficult as the value varies greatly by required features and scraped targets. That's the whole reason we made Scrapeway! To start see our blog What is the best web scraping API?
How much do web scraping APIs cost?
Web scraping services have varying prices that depend on the configurations used. The final cost can be affected by whether headless browsers are required, the type of proxy pool used, bandwidth, and anti-bot bypass. Refer to our benchmarks for a price estimation on different target websites.
Summary
In this brief guide, you have learned about the benefits of using web scraping APIs. They address the difficulties associated with data extraction, making it scalable by:
- Providing ready-to-use features.
- Bypassing blocking and anti-bot systems.
- Saving time, cost, and effort in development cycles.
Need help choosing a web scraping service? Check out our benchmarks table and APIs overview to evaluate the available services.