This article explains what a web scraper is and how website scraping works in Watermelon Pulse.
What is a web scraper?
Imagine the web scraper as a smart internet robot that collects information from websites. It's like a helpful assistant that looks up and gathers all the important data from a website for you. It does this by sending special requests to the websites, asking them to provide information. This might sound a bit technical, but it helps you get the data you need without having to do everything manually.
How does the Web Scraper Work in Watermelon Pulse?
In Watermelon Pulse, the Web Scraper works in a clever and friendly way. It sends requests to the websites to get information, but it does so with caution. For example, the scraper sends 3 requests per second. Think of it as asking 3 questions to the website in just one second. But after that, it takes a "back-off" of 60 seconds. The back-off is like a break for the scraper. After every 3 requests per second, it waits for 60 seconds before sending new requests. This ensures that the scraper doesn't send too many requests all at once, which could overwhelm a website. It gives the websites some breathing space, so they can keep functioning normally.
The scraper keeps going through all the web addresses (URLs) of the website until it has visited them all and collected all the information. Once it has visited all the URLs and sent requests, it stops sending requests until you indicate that you want to start scraping again.
In this article you can read how to use the Web Scraper in Watermelon Pulse.
How Does the Scraper Send Requests to Websites?
The scraper is not an ordinary visitor; it has a few clever tricks to stay unnoticed. The requests the scraper sends don't all come from one address; that's the IP address. The IP address is like your home address on the internet. Just as a letter is sent to your home address, most internet requests come from one fixed IP address.
But the scraper is smarter. It goes through multiple proxies before sending requests to websites. A proxy is like an intermediary that forwards the requests on behalf of the scraper. This makes it look like the requests are coming from different addresses, namely the addresses of the proxies. This makes it harder to figure out the real sender and helps to remain more anonymous.
And then there's something called the "user agent." A user agent is like a disguise for the scraper's internet browser. Normally, a browser tells the website which browser it is, like Chrome or Firefox. But the scraper disguises itself by using a "dynamic" user agent. It tells the website: "Hello there, I'm just a regular visitor looking around!" This makes the website think that the scraper is just an ordinary visitor and not a special scraper.