Proxy Ninjutsu: Make Your Web Crawler Vanish Like a Ghost

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In the era of big data, web crawling has become an important method of obtaining information. Web crawling is a technology that automatically extracts information from the Internet and stores it locally or in a database. It can traverse data on the Internet for data mining and data analysis, and is widely used in various fields such as search engine, e-commerce, finance, aviation, medicine and scientific research.

During web crawling, if you send a lot of requests from the same IP address, the website may recognise and block you. This is where proxies come in handy. Proxies allow you to use different IP addresses and pretend that people from all over the world are visiting the site. The probability of being detected and blocked is greatly reduced. croxy is a trusted proxy provider with access to more than 80 million high-quality residential IPs in 195 territories around the world, powered by the world’s leading proxy network.

While proxies are relatively affordable, if you are making tens of thousands of requests per day, the costs can add up significantly. Since proxies are often inactive and need to be replaced, they need to be monitored frequently.

Next, let’s look at how to avoid being blocked when crawling the web using proxies!

1. Rotate your proxy

One of the common means for websites to identify and block crawlers is to detect the access patterns of IP addresses. You can use some IP rotation service tool, which is like spreading your access requests into a whole bunch of different IP addresses and sending them out. This way, your real IP is hidden, and the behaviour of the crawlers visiting the site will look more like a normal user browsing the web normally. Although most websites can be crawled smoothly with this method, when it comes to those websites with particularly advanced anti-crawl systems, this method is still not enough, and you may have to use a residential proxy.

Here’s a Python implementation using Requests and a rotating proxy:

2. Use of residential proxies or stealth proxies

The IP address of a residential proxy, which is like a unique door number assigned to the user by the ISP, looks exactly like a regular user’s IP. Compared to data centre proxies, residential proxies are less likely to be found and blocked by websites. If you require a high level of security when crawling data and don’t want to be detected by websites, you can try stealth proxies. These proxies are like ‘invisibility cloaks’ that are designed to avoid detection by websites, and they are especially good for websites that are particularly strong in anti-crawling techniques.

There is another type of network not to be missed – mobile proxies. The IP addresses of mobile 3G and 4G proxies come from a pool of addresses allocated by mobile network operators. For those websites and applications that focus on mobile, or even only serve mobile phone users, using mobile proxies to crawl data is like visiting in disguise as a regular mobile phone user, and the stealth is superb.

3. Centralise your proxy management

There are quite a few platforms that offer proxy server management services, but generally paid platforms are always more trustworthy than free proxies. Paid proxies are more secure in terms of quality and stability.

The goodness of the proxy server directly determines whether your web crawling can go smoothly or not. Therefore, it’s never a bad idea to spend some money on a reliable proxy service.

In the era of big data and digital information explosion, the value of web crawlers as a technical means to efficiently obtain public data is increasingly prominent, and the reasonable use of proxies is the core strategy to break through the anti-climbing mechanism of websites.