Everything you need to know to tackle website blocking while scraping.
There is a lot of content available on the millions of websites on the Internet, and all of them involve some amount of programming to get them there, however, to get to all this content using a programmatic API isn’t really possible. If you need data scraped from a website in a specific format in real time, an API is the way to go. API for web scraping allows you the flexibility to scrape the website whenever you need and you can easily integrate it with your applications.
e.g. If you need product pricing in real time from a website like Amazon which doesn’t change the site structure often and the data can always be found in a particular location every time it would make more sense to get to that data anytime by scraping via an API.
We wouldn’t recommend everyone use web scraping based APIs unless you need to refresh the data in real time (e.g. – pricing, flash sales, open houses).
If you are OK with getting data every month/week/day then using a regular, scheduled scraper would suit you better. Also, if you need a large amount of data, an API is not suited for such use.
An API is a custom service that gives you more control over when the data is to be scraped and when you need tighter integration with your programs, tools and infrastructure.
An API gives you more control on when you need the data- you can request the data as you go instead of waiting to receive the data. An API is also developer friendly and once fully functional requires minimum maintenance.
It is analogous to going through a drive-thru – speak your order into a microphone (API) and get your food (data) at the exit.
ScrapeHero has a great deal of experience and success in creating APIs for many global websites. The ScrapeHero API is cloud based, secure and scalable hence allowing you to grow and expand your services as well.
Some of the benefits of using a cloud based API are:
- An API guarantees you the latest data, because the data is scraped only when requested and not pre-scraped data which can be a few days or weeks old.
- Cloud based would also mean minimum human interaction which would in turn mean higher security and easy scalability.
An API requires the minimum maintenance – once an API has been created for a website and all the different types of requests are addressed, it requires very little maintenance to be done. This, combined with ScrapeHero’s support means you would need to face minimum down time if anything does change.
If you are looking at sites that don’t provide an API, or provide a rate or functionality limited API, reach out to us and we can help build you a custom solution – exactly the way you want it.
Need a custom API built ? Let us know
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