A datacenter proxy routes web requests through IP addresses hosted in commercial data centers, offering fast speeds and low costs for web scraping projects that need to collect data at scale.
A residential proxy routes web requests through real home IP addresses, making your scraping traffic look like regular users and helping you avoid blocks on protected websites.
A session is a continuous interaction between your scraper and a website where the server remembers you across multiple requests. Sessions let you stay logged in, access user-specific content, and avoid detection by maintaining realistic browsing patterns.
Authentication verifies your identity before accessing protected content on websites. Learn how authentication works in web scraping, including different methods like API keys, OAuth, CSRF tokens, and session cookies, plus common challenges you'll face when scraping authenticated sites.
A session cookie is a temporary identifier that websites use to remember you during a single browsing session. It lives in your browser's memory and disappears when you close the browser, enabling features like login persistence and shopping carts.
URL parameters are pieces of information added to web addresses that control what content gets displayed. They're essential for web scraping because they let you filter, sort, and navigate through data programmatically without manual clicking.
Infinite scroll is a web design pattern that automatically loads new content as you scroll down a page, eliminating pagination. Learn how it works and its impact on web scraping.
Pagination splits website content across multiple pages. When scraping, you need strategies to navigate through all pages and collect complete datasets instead of just the first page of results.
REST API is an interface that lets two systems exchange information over the internet using standardized HTTP protocols. It provides structured data access that's cleaner and more reliable than HTML scraping.
An API (application programming interface) is a set of rules that lets different software applications communicate and exchange data automatically, providing a structured alternative to web scraping.
