Scraping is the art of mining data or harvesting information from different web pages and websites. Scraping is really important when it comes to making the internet what it is today. Harvesting and scraping of data also require the privacy and anonymity of the user to avoid IP ban or security checks like CAPTCHA.

That’s why secure servers and proxies are a necessity to get things done in a more reliable and secure way. The best and preferred proxies for data scraping are residential proxies.

How the Residential IP Proxies works?

If you want to increase privacy between the source and the target address, the best way to do that would be through residential IP proxies, Want to know why? If you know nothing about residential proxies, I suggest you read a research from privateproxyreviews.com which about what is the residential IP and benefits of residential proxies.

They are the web servers that help in increasing privacy and filtering of data, preferred proxies for data scraping are residential proxies, A pool of IPs and back-connect proxies keep changing the IP address every time you use the web server or access any webpage.

So you must be thinking why the residential proxies are more reliable than the simple and easily available proxy servers?

Here’s what happens when you access a website via proxy servers. The proxies act as the middleman to provide anonymity and privacy to the user. In regular and common proxies, your IP address remains the same on the internet and it can be traced back after accessing a webpage several times. You cannot stay secure for long and the chances of getting restricted increase gradually. But, with the residential proxies, you get a new IP address at every request or time intervals and the back-connect proxies make it very difficult to identify or trace the user, providing you with full anonymity and privacy.

With residential proxies, the connection will follow the standardized protocols and have the receiving end respond to the data it has altered rather than the one that is in actuality. Every time you will try to access a server, your IP address will be switched and provide you with a secure and reliable proxy server. Keep in mind that not all back-connect proxy provider offers residential proxies, some of provider use the a pool of data center proxies as the back-connect proxy, may be easily to block for scraping or web crawling.

Residential Proxies for data scraping

Scraping is like downloading a huge file and data you might get benefit from or even for research purposes or data analysis. You can get banned or restricted to access a website if you start scraping a web page with proxies that are not secure and are easy to detect. Therefore, it is very important that this process is carried out through proxies that are wise enough to handle such situations.

So with residential proxies, a pool of IPs and back-connect proxies keep changing the IP address every time you use the web server or access any webpage, providing you with full privacy and a secure way of data scraping. The residential proxies should:

• Not be listed with any proxy server
• Provide you with complete anonymity
• Come from legitimate sources
• Be undetectable

Tools for Scraping Data

The method used for scraping data mainly depends on the tool you use for this very purpose. There are many tools that already exist so you won’t have to develop your own. Let’s have a look at a few of the best tools for data scraping.

• Visual Web Ripper: It is a very user-friendly and easy to use a scraper tool. All you have to do is to point out the information you want to scrap and the software will do the rest. The full version of the program with lifetime upgrades is of 350$.
• Cloud Crawler: This one is a free open source project. This crawler is a web spider working in the web cloud but it is difficult to use as there’s no proper documentation for it.
• Scrapy: This one is the best and most reliable scraper tool and most importantly it is free and easy to configure.

Legality of Data Scraping:

Websites like Craigslist have clearly mentioned in their terms of service that the scraping of data with a crawler, scraper or bot of any sort is prohibited on the website. So the question that comes to mind is if data scraping is legal or not?

For a website like craigslist and other classified ads sites, data scraping is against their policy and they also have taken legal action in the past over such actions. It all depends on the scale of scraping and usage of data you harvest from a website. Depending on how you choose to use scraping, its effects can be both good and bad. You can get banned and restricted for it, so you better watch out if you are harvesting personal data or information in bulk that might get you in trouble.

If you do not know your way around the proxies, there are high chances that you will end up getting caught. In fact, improper use of residential proxies can put all your scraping efforts to waste. Since multiple requests of the same type would be generated from the system, without proper masking, it would be fairly easy to trace it back to your system. This is the reason why people often use residential proxies in connection to back-connect proxies: to improve security without compromising on the speed at all.