How to get a continuous stream of data from these sites without being interrupted? The scraping logic depends on the HTML sent by the web server in the page requests, if anything changes in the output it will likely break the scraper configuration.
If you are running a website that relies on getting continuously updated data from some websites, it can be dangerous to respond using just software.
Some of the challenges you should think about:
- Webmasters are always changing their sites to be friendlier and better looking, which in turn breaks the scraper’s delicate data extraction logic.
- IP Address Blocking: If you keep copying from a website in your office web scraping tool, your IP will be blocked by “security guards” one day.
- Websites are increasingly using better ways to send data, Ajax, client-side web service calls, etc. Making it increasingly difficult to dispose of data from these sites. Unless you’re a programming expert, you won’t be able to pull out the data.
- Think of a situation where your newly created website started to flourish and suddenly the dream data feed you used to stop. In today’s resource-rich society, your users will switch to a service that is still serving them new data.
Overcoming these challenges
Let the experts help you, people who have been in this business for a long time and have been serving customers day in and day out. They run their own servers, which are just there to do a job, extract data. IP blocking is no problem for them as they can switch servers in minutes and get the scraping exercise back on track. Try this service and you will see what I mean here.
