In this article, we summarize the basics of web scraping.
When you search for something on a platform like Amazon and get instant results, it’s because you’re interacting directly with their servers, which are optimized to handle user queries efficiently. The web scraping process is a bit more intricate due to multiple factors. When we scrape data from websites, we’re sending requests to their servers, just like you do when you search for something. But unlike direct user queries, your requests to our web scraping APIs need to be routed through multiple proxies, which forward the requests to the target site.
Due to the nature of the internet and the varying proxy speeds, the time to receive a response to a request will also vary. Additionally, websites often have rate limiting or anti-scraping measures in place to prevent excessive traffic from automated bots, which can delay requests.
Web scraping involves retrieving and processing large amounts of data. Even after receiving a response from the server, the API needs to process the data to extract the relevant information and transform it into the desired format. This processing can take additional time, especially if we’re dealing site or page layout changes on complex websites. We may need to adjust our scraping methods or retry requests if they fail initially, due to changes in the website’s layout or behavior.
While web scraping aims to retrieve data efficiently, it involves navigating through various obstacles such as proxy routing, rate limiting and data processing, which can contribute to the delay in providing results compared to direct user queries. Hopefully this explanation clarifies why there might be differences in the speed of obtaining results via a web scraping compared to direct searches on complex platforms like Amazon.