You would also need some process manager to make sure your scraper scripts restart automatically. You could skip this step and write directly to the database from the scraper if you are not writing a lot of data. Another process would read from the data queue and write it to a database while the scraper is running. Scrape them and put the extracted data into another queue and feed newly discovered URLs into the URL Queue. You can design scrapers to read URLs from a queue in the broker. URL Queue and a Data Queue – using Message Broker like Redis, RabbitMQ or Kafka to distribute URLs and data across the scrapers that are running in different servers. Here are some components you would need to make this happen – Here are some tips to run web scrapers on a large scale – Distributed Web Scraping Architectureįor scraping millions of pages daily, you will need a few servers and a way to distribute your scrapers across them and have them communicate with each other. Be nice to websites you scrape without putting a heavy load on their servers and CDNs. ScrapeHero’s infrastructure can scrape websites at a rate of 3,000 pages per second, but we never use it all on a single website. There is also a massive community of Python developers if you are in need of better talent. You could use tools like Selenium with Python for scraping most of the modern websites built using Javascript frameworks like React, Angular, or VueJS. It also has the most number of web scraping frameworks and is excellent for parsing and processing data. The most popular web scraping framework, Scrapy is built using Python.
Which programming language is the best for building web scrapers?Īnother common question we usually hear from our readers at ScrapeHero is: Which programming language should we use for building web scrapers? You are better off building a scraper from scratch using a programming language like Python. If the website is complex and you need to do large scale web scraping. We are yet to find an open-source visual web scraping tool that can handle complex logic. We recommend that you use visual tools for extracting data from websites that are not too complicated or if your scraping logic is complex. But once you hit a wall, there isn’t much you can do. Visual web scraping tools are pretty good at extracting data from simple websites and are easy to get started with. Should you use a visual web scraping tool? Take a list of keywords, perform a search in google maps for each keyword, go to the result – extract contact details, repeat the same process on Yelp and a few other websites, then finally combine all this data.Scraping details from a listing website, search with the listing name in another site, combine this data and save it to a database.Alternatively, you can check and reverse engineer the REST API of the website if it exists. You will need a real web browser such as Puppeteer or Selenium to scrape the data.
What is a complex website?Īny website that is built using some advanced JavaScript frameworks such as React or Angular is usually complex if you are extracting a lot of data from it. Generally speaking, the more flexible the tool, the more the learning curve, and conversely the easy-to-use tools may not handle complex sites or complex logic. Some tools are better than others at handling the complexity of the sites. The choice of tools or frameworks should depend on a few factors depending upon the website(s) that you plan to scrape. This has already happened in our industry with a high profile company, read more about that here – Demise of Kimono Labs and the fate of their users. You will not lock yourself into the ecosystem of a proprietary tool, having no way to move hundreds of scrapers into another tool if they shut down. The best reason build your own web scraper would be that you won’t run into the risk of your developer(s) disappearing one day, leaving no one to maintain your scrapers. You can get started with building your own web scraping solution by following some of our web scraping tutorials. Next, its recommended to select a web scraping framework for building your scrapers – like Scrapy (Python), PySpider (Python) or Puppeteer(Javascript). The best way to build a web scraper would be using one of the many w eb scraping tools and frameworks.
#Scale webscraper how to#
But to learn more about what is web scraping and how to build a web scraper using Python, you can read our guide –īeginners Guide to Web Scraping and Data Extraction
This article will give you tips on how to build scrapers on a large scale.