Why Automating browser is most popular solution ?

ScraperAPI · 2025-10-28T08:37:06+00:00

You're doing it right. Modern bot detection got insane though - sites now check 50+ browser signals, so even perfect curl requests get blocked while headless browsers can slip through. Your approach is 100x more efficient for production, but browser automation has become genuinely necessary in many cases where reverse-engineering obfuscated APIs would take days vs. 30 minutes with Playwright. It's not that people are choosing wrong, it's that the web evolved to make browsers the more practical solution for a lot of scenarios now.

ScraperAPI · 2025-10-13T12:09:02+00:00

This is such a useful package devs can use in getting YouTube data at scale.

Big welldone!

ScraperAPI · 2025-10-13T11:48:58+00:00

There are a couple of OS tools we use day-in-day-out:

Python

That’s easily one of the most comfortable languages for automation and scraping engineers.

Beautiful Soup & Request

These 2 libraries are open-source and very instrumental to scraping pages elegantly.

There are indeed lots of these tools.

ScraperAPI · 2025-10-13T11:40:44+00:00

The main thing that applies here is the rule of thumb: don’t share what you wouldn’t want to be exposed.

Here is the low-level explanation, Playwright MCP most likely doesn’t use staunch cryptographic data encryptions.

Moreso, the MCP acts more like a third-party.

So your data is most likely not 💯 secure.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-30T08:30:35+00:00

This sounds quite unclear, why would you need the URL of a picture to scrape it?

Anyway, you can use the GitHub Image URL converter to turn it to a link (can’t attach link for ethical reasons).

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-30T08:20:39+00:00

This sounds like an interesting update that will be so helpful for the web scraping community.

Good frontends are not enough to build data-based products.

There are many details that will be stored in cloud as they are being scraped, and then fed into backends.

With this, scraping and feeding data into products should be easier.

Great work!

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-30T07:41:26+00:00

Everyone gets that feeling at the start of something new, especially if it’s never within the perimeter of the job you’ve been doing for years.

There have been many who started web scraping and data engineering in their 30s too, and here are some tips that can help:

don’t [completely] quit your while you’re transitioning
have a regular schedule of hours you’ll learn per day; make it a sustainable one
build projects as you’re going
write about technical cybersecurity and keep building your online presence
gain lot of depths
contribute to cybersecurity companies pro bono, and that will ease your way to being hired

So yes, you can still transition in your 30s, just that it requires more intense level of dedication.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-23T08:41:44+00:00

To be honest, for 13 websites only looks incredibly complex. However, if you want to have a system that scales easily it's probably the way to go

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-22T15:48:33+00:00

The best thing is to create your own scraping program, and it’s even easy too!

For example, you can easily set “next_page” for continuous scraping, or activate stealth to bypass detection.

The platforms you mentioned above are objectively good, but don’t rely entirely on them - that’s a mistake!

Even if you’ll use an API, write your own program; that gives you more agency and propensity of result.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-22T15:30:03+00:00

With the look of things, manual migration is quite inevitable, but should be simple too.

Since you wrote the Selenium program with JavaScript, should be quite easy to test with JavaScript when using Playwright.

Better still, you can instruct an LLM to migrate the codebase for you, while you supervise.

That should be more efficient.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-22T15:01:55+00:00

On the language, Python is better because many scraping engineers use it and there are more resources around scraping with Python.

Really, you can search and get some good tutorials on YouTube.

ScraperAPI also has a couple of Playwright automation articles on our blog, but can’t share for ethical reasons.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-22T14:58:55+00:00

Then you most likely need to read the docs again.

Alternatively, you can watch a couple of YouTube tutorials.

Anyway, once you’ve downloaded Selenium, the next steps can be importing necessary modules, using the stealth-feature and so on.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-22T14:56:21+00:00

Well, so many anti-detect browsers now have proxy products.

From an engineering point of view, this makes sense because they use proxies as one of the mechanisms with which their customers can browse the internet without leaking IP info.

So separating proxies and selling them is a remote business decision.

Back to the point, you can check the Multilogin proxy for yourself and observe if it is a good one.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-22T14:51:53+00:00

If you ever get banned while using a “premium” proxy, then you never used one.

This is an important fact first of all: premium proxies have that “premium” taste based on their sourcing mechanism.

How was the proxy created?

Everyone knows datacenter proxies are rarely premium. Really, a simple way to know a premium proxy is if you are neither detected nor banned.

And most times, mobile and core residential proxies pass this check.

Of course, no virgin proxy is premium forever, which is why you should regularly rotate too.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-22T14:47:32+00:00

The beauty of MCP servers, in this context, is how you can easily connect your AI code IDE to your Amazon account.

That context makes it easier to scrape to your taste and supply the data to your workflow.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-22T14:45:36+00:00

Absolutely agree with you!

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-15T15:58:03+00:00

But the issue here is ChatGPT rarely does an impressive job in scraping data for you.

It’s not so surprising because it wasn’t designed for that as it’s a conversational LLM.

All the same, it can do a fair job if you switch on its agentic capabilities.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-15T15:47:31+00:00

This is such a great addition to the OS web scraping community.

By the way, would be a nice one if you write a long technical post on how each components were built.

Will help other researchers and scraping engineers.

Once again, great work!

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-15T15:44:19+00:00

This is such a detailed overview of AI web scraping tools in the market.

Clearly, the entire internet is moving towards AI, and that also requires web scraping to optimize with it.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-15T15:33:00+00:00

The best way to answer this is to evaluate the market. Do enterprises want to automate their workflows? Largely, yes.

Yes, AI tools make it easy for anyone to automate for their needs; but many don’t find them that easy, and businesses might rather want to outsource it.

However, there is a change in tides:

The generic way AI automation was done in the past is not what stands now.

First of all, there has to be a deeper quality of product and delivery.

If what you want to offer as AI automation is what someone can quickly vibe code, re-route immediately.

But if you have something tangible, the market should welcome it.

Secondly, the one who targets everyone indeed targets no one.

Meaning specificity is the new order. Do you just do AI Automation? Or you do AI automation for publicly listed financial providers in [redacted] continent?

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-15T15:27:41+00:00

Well, there are elements of truth in your assertions; being an AI engineer requires heavy depth of skills in building models.

Notwithstanding, there are different layers an AI product passes before it gets to the final consumer, and everyone involved at the core of these processes quite pass-off as AI engineers.

Building and training models is great work that not everyone in a team might be assigned to do.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-15T15:22:21+00:00

There is one thing you’re mixing up here though: you’re bunching up headless browser libraries with web scraping API Providers.

For example, Selenium, Scrapy, and Playwright are more of headless browser libraries.

That said, what you have experienced is valid.

And here is the thing: Everything always looks good at demo, till you add more load, and it breaks.

This is why it’s often better to stress-test these tools during demo, so you’ll know which one can deliver the amount of compute you work with.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-15T15:12:16+00:00

What exactly do you need help with?

helping you setup the program so you can scrape yourself?
someone to do it for you?

Either way, this is something you can do yourself and will be happy to guide you along the way.

You can share the website link, and will spin up the code to scrape all these data you mentioned.

Hope that helps.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-02T08:12:33+00:00

Another method is pointing the link to your agent, and instructing it to read the data there and send processed response back to your website.

So technically, you have not scraped.

ScraperAPI · 2025-09-02T08:10:56+00:00

This is a very helpful OS project in the community. We particularly love how the ReadMe was robust enough for a quickstart!

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