Introduction
Scraping big websites could be a challenging job if performed in the wrong way. Big websites might have additional data, additional security, and additional pages. At X-Byte Enterprise Crawling, we’ve learned all the things from our years of experience in crawling big and complex websites, so these data scraping tips might help you solve many challenges.
Tips for Scraping Big Websites
Let’s go through 5 important web scraping tips for web scraping best practices:
Cache the Downloaded Data
While scraping the big websites, you can always cache the information you have downloaded. Therefore, you don’t need to put any load on a website again, if you have started over again or the page is requisite again during large scale web scraping. It’seasy to cache the key-value stores like Redis, however, file system caches and databases are also fine.
Make Parallel Website Requests at a Slow Pace
Big size websites possess algorithms to identify webscraping, a huge number of parallel requests from similar IP addresses will recognize you as the ‘Denial of Service Attack’ on the website, as well as blacklist all your IPs straight away. A superior idea is timing your requests correctly sequentially, providing that some human behaviors. However, scraping like it would take you some ages. Therefore, balance requests providing an average response time of websites, as well as playing around with total parallel requests fora website to find the right numbers.
Store Already Fetched URLs
You might want to have the listing of URLs that you have fetched already, in the database or key-value stores. What will you do in case you extract crashes after extracting 70% of a website? In case, you want to complete 30% remaining, without the URL list, you’ll waste ample bandwidth and time. Ensure that you store the lists of URLs anywhere permanent, till you get all the necessary data. It might also get combined with a cache. That’s how you can resume web scraping detection.
Divide Scraping into Various Phases
It’s safe and easy if you divide scraping into different small phases. For instance, you can split extracting a big website into two. Among the collecting links to different pages for which you want to scrape data as well as another to download these pages for anonymous web scraping python.
Use Only the Required Links
Don’t follow or grab every link exceptits necessary. You can describe a suitable navigation scheme for making the scraper visiting only the required pages. It is always inviting to collect everything, however, it’s only a waste of time, storage, and bandwidth.
Conclusion
If you need any help in data extraction or web scraping using the services, at X-Byte Enterprise Crawling, we are ready to help! Having problems scraping any big websites then we can assist. We extract millions of pages daily. To know about more web data scraping tips, contact X-Byte now!
✯ Alpesh Khunt ✯
