What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping or web crawling is the act of getting publicly available data from the internet. As the internet is the richest data source known to man and a lot of it is user-generated content (like reviews, social posts, comments, and more), the variety of publicly available data for web scraping is endless. In this quick tutorial, I will walk you through the steps required to successfully scrape Walmart product data in less than a dozen lines of code, using Node.JS and Scrapezone’s web scraping SDK.
Why Is It Hard to Maintain a Dedicated Scraper
The main problems with web scraping are websites change and bot detection. HTML pages do not look the same every day and minor change in how the website displays their data requires changes to the scraper and in some cases, even a small change to the website’s structure might require a complete rebuild.
Suppose you are building a solution that revolves around analyzing publicly available data. In that case, you will probably require multiple scrapers running in parallel to provide data in a timely, reliable and accurate way. When writing a scraper, the development team must run daily tests on it, monitor website changes, and adjust the scrapers accordingly.
Using a web scraping SDK like Scrapezone’s officially maintained scrapers guarantees you just get the data at scale without worrying about any changes to the website’s structure.
Scraping Data at a Large Scale
When scraping data at a large scale, you will hit a brick wall in the form of being blocked by anti-bot detections. Most eCommerce marketplaces, search and travel websites have some form of another of an anti-bot protection system. The classic way of dealing with this bot detection is imitating a real user: using different IP addresses, utilizing headless browsers like Puppeteer or Selenium, setting up original and reliable browser-fingerprints, and throttling your request rates. Some proxy providing companies even promise automatic rotating proxies, so you do not need to worry about maintaining and managing a list of IP addresses.
Coding Time
All right, now let us dive in and get some code done to scrape the product data. In this example, I will cover how to scrape the product pages of some Headphones from Walmart.
#integration #web scraping #node.js #walmart
