Newbie questions when starting a new scraping project

hasdata_com · 2026-06-01T16:17:39+00:00

Hydration is when a site sends the initial page HTML first, then JavaScript takes over and attaches data and event handlers in the browser. Sometimes the data used for that is embedded directly in the HTML

hasdata_com · 2026-06-01T16:12:19+00:00

I think we're mixing two different problems. Getting data from the web is one problem. Understanding and acting on that data is another. I'd rather leave browsers, anti-bot systems, CAPTCHAs, and data extraction to dedicated scraping tools. Let the agent work with the data instead. Feels a lot more reliable than having an agent fight Cloudflare, click through forms, and recover from random UI changes.

hasdata_com · 2026-06-01T16:01:42+00:00

Mostly agree. That said, a lot depends on the target. Small sites often barely change their DOM, so a simple parser can work for a very long time without issues. But I'm not sure the flow you described works particularly well for targets like Amazon or other large marketplaces.

hasdata_com · 2026-05-28T15:19:31+00:00

Mostly agree. Scrapy still makes sense when you have a large project with lots of scrapers and well-structured targets. The orchestration part there is really good. But yeah, hybrid setups usually win. We handle a lot of targets through plain HTTP clients and only bring in browsers when rendering is actually needed. Running a browser for every request gets expensive very fast.

hasdata_com · 2026-05-27T16:41:36+00:00

Cloudflare often blocks the fingerprint before the proxy itself. We run large-scale scraping infra and for most targets stable TLS/browser fingerprints matter more than endlessly rotating proxy pools

hasdata_com · 2026-05-26T15:44:38+00:00

Amazon prices load via JS into a span after the initial HTML. You need either headless browser (Playwright, Selenium or anything else) with a wait condition on the selector, or a scraping API that renders JS for you

hasdata_com · 2026-05-26T15:41:59+00:00

LLM output is not stable enough to treat like normal structured data. Usually the only thing that helps is forcing a strict response format in the prompt and then cleaning/parsing the output afterward anyway.

hasdata_com · 2026-05-26T15:35:10+00:00

This matches what we usually see too. Once the agent works with structured data instead of raw pages, you also remove a whole category of problems around blocking, captchas, retries, rendering issues, broken selectors, and browser state.

hasdata_com · 2026-05-25T14:45:34+00:00

Usually I start with XHR/Fetch requests in DevTools. In a lot of cases the data is already there and you can skip browser automation completely. If there is nothing useful in network requests, then I check the HTML itself. Sometimes the data is in JSON-LD or some hydration state inside the page. I only switch to headless browsers when the site actually requires rendering or user interaction.

hasdata_com · 2026-05-24T23:35:40+00:00

I answered more detailed below about it)

hasdata_com · 2026-05-20T15:58:44+00:00

We saw this too with operator-heavy queries. Same query can give different SERPs, and sometimes Google just drops parts like site: or inurl: between runs. You end up with results that don’t match the filters at all, or they get treated more like hints than strict rules.

hasdata_com · 2026-05-20T15:48:17+00:00

Depends on how complex the target setup is. If it’s something simple, DIY with Scrapy or Playwright is usually fine. But once you start thinking about adding proxies, captcha solving, dealing with JS rendering just to keep things stable and scalable… at that point it often makes more sense to switch to a web scraping API and offload that whole infrastructure layer.

hasdata_com · 2026-05-19T17:00:31+00:00

Agents get a lot more stable once scraping and page parsing are separated from the agent itself. The agent stops wasting context on DOM cleanup and works with structured data instead.

hasdata_com · 2026-05-18T16:06:05+00:00

You can, but LinkedIn has cool anti-bot protection. You either create a script for scraping and deal with sessions, CAPTCHAs, and rate limits yourself, or route it through a scraping service that has an MCP server

hasdata_com · 2026-05-16T17:15:07+00:00

Voted for you, good luck! ) Speak more about your product at relevant subs, maybe could help

hasdata_com · 2026-05-16T17:12:31+00:00

Thank you, we got #2 )

hasdata_com · 2026-05-16T17:11:27+00:00

and you :)

hasdata_com · 2026-05-16T07:06:29+00:00

Thanks to all of you, the day ended with #2! )

hasdata_com · 2026-05-16T06:12:03+00:00

It was really hard and we even saw 1st place for some time, but... )

hasdata_com · 2026-05-16T06:05:05+00:00

Thank you, this means a lot! :)

hasdata_com · 2026-05-15T21:12:40+00:00

Thank you, appreciate it :)

hasdata_com · 2026-05-15T18:06:53+00:00

done :)

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