Tips, tools, and best practices for web scraping, data extraction, and automation.
59 articles
Nine data extraction APIs for web pages and documents, sorted by where your data lives. Real per-page and per-record costs, the three extraction approaches, and how to stop AI extraction from inventing values.
Nine SERP APIs compared on what actually decides accuracy and cost: location and device controls, AI Overview support, billing rules, the num=100 price shock, and the legal risks most roundups skip.
The best use cases of Apify: Google Maps leads, price monitoring, social media data, AI and RAG content, agent access via MCP, reviews and SEO tracking, plus costs and when to skip it.
Firecrawl vs Playwright compared: a managed web data API against a browser automation library. Costs, self-hosting limits, proxies, AI use cases, and which one to pick.
The eight Apify Actors that actually hold up for Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit and more, plus the proxy layer and legal limits that decide whether your social scraping pipeline survives.
Apify pricing for 2026 explained: how compute units work, every plan compared, the proxy and storage costs outside your subscription, and how to cut your bill.
An in-depth Apify review for 2026: the Actor model, Apify Store, Crawlee SDK, built-in proxies, real pros and cons, who it suits, and how it compares to alternatives.
How large-scale web crawlers manage request queues: the crawl frontier, two-layer priority and politeness design, Bloom filter deduplication, and distributed partitioning.
Stateless vs stateful scraping architecture explained: what state really is, when each model fits, how sticky and rotating proxies map to each, and how to build a hybrid.
A layer-by-layer breakdown of how browser automation traffic differs from normal HTTP requests, from TCP and TLS fingerprints to HTTP/2 frames, header order, and timing.
The best proxies for backlinks monitoring in 2026. Compare 7 top providers, plus a tiered datacenter-first strategy that cuts crawl costs without losing accuracy.
The best proxies for Google Maps scraping in 2026. Compare 7 top residential and mobile providers, plus which proxy type works, how to avoid blocks, and the legal position.