Wanna Scrape the Web? Here’s How APIs Solve All Data Extraction Problems!

Web scraping to extract various amounts of data over the Internet is a valuable information gathering technique. I am sure you’ve heard of the term API and how popular such tools are among developers.

In this article, I will talk about how using an API for web scraping is a better way to get things done and what features make it so special.

If you are ready to start this journey alongside me, let’s begin with the basics of what an API is and why developers use them.

What is an API
How web scraping APIs work
The most important web scraping API features
∘ 1. Adaptability to different websites
∘ 2. Speed
∘ 3. Large proxy pools and rotating proxies
∘ 4. Clear documentation
∘ 5. Good error handling
What do you think? Would you give APIs a try?

What is an API

An Application Programming Interface, or API for short, serves as a bridge that connects an application to a server. Using a set of functions, said app can access data and interact with external software components, operating systems, or microservices. The API sends your request to the system and receives the system’s response afterward.

Why are APIs powerful development tools? Because they speed up the creation of different applications and software and can be integrated very quickly into your project. For example, if you are building your own software and need to add extra security for your users, integrating a face recognition feature on your own would be very time-consuming.

The same goes if your application needs to scrape the web for different data. Connecting your software to an API that does it for you sounds like a more fit solution.

Using an API isn’t rocket science. Most of them come with documentation, which is a manual for developers to understand what features the API has and how to use them properly.

Now that we got a better view of what an API is used for, let’s see how we can use one to do the web scraping for us.

How web scraping APIs work

Some APIs can help out while scraping the web in different ways. Most APIs have a playground where you can test out the output of your request and documentation that provides information about how to properly use said API.

Let’s take WebScrapingAPI as an example. In order to scrape a website, all you have to do is send a request to the API and set as parameters:

• A unique access key (provided when creating a free account);
• The URL of the website you wish to extract data from;
• Other parameters are used to: change proxy type, render JavaScript, use geolocation.

curl"https://api.webscrapingapi.com/v1api_key=XXXXXX&url=https://httpbin.org/get"

If successful, the API will send a response with the extracted information, ready for you to manipulate in any way you like.

The most important web scraping API features

To get the expected result without unpleasant incidents, a user must benefit from a good web scraping API with a set of great features. Let’s get a clearer view of these features and their advantages.

1. Adaptability to different websites

Since web scraping is an information-gathering technique, businesses don’t want their competitors to grow using their data. They provide countermeasures to prevent their websites from being scraped using different ways to detect bots, such as:

• CAPTCHAs
• Browser fingerprinting
• IP rate limiting
• Detecting suspicious IP addresses

A well-built web scraping API would evade these obstacles and get the desired results carefree, without being detected. If you want to know more, you can have a look at some of the biggest web scraping roadblocks and learn how to avoid them.

2. Speed

Besides speeding up development by covering needed features, there are other advantages associated with APIs. Provided with well-written documentation, the integration of an API is pretty straightforward.

Their processing speed is also high. A good web scraping API would crawl the website and extract the information in a few seconds at most. Even if the job is quite demanding and needs thousands of requests, that shouldn’t be a problem.

3. Large proxy pools and rotating proxies

Proxies are very useful if you want to scrape a website in a stealthy manner, but that doesn’t mean a single proxy is enough to get the job done. Here a couple of reasons why you need a larger proxy pool to achieve your goals:

• Some websites have geo-restricted content, meaning you can access information only from specific locations worldwide. Using proxies from all over the world and rotating them depending on these needs will solve this problem.
• Unfortunately, a proxy might be blocked instantly when detected, so retrying with a different proxy may be challenging if you lack resources.
• Scraping more websites at a time means using more proxies at the same time. Having a wide proxy pool can be quite advantageous when sending concurrent requests.

Managing a proxy pool on my own means I would have to put a lot of effort and time into it, as there are quite a few roadblocks, like the ones mentioned above. Letting the API manage the proxy pool is quite a nice feature.

If you are interested to find out more, have a glance at why proxy pools are important when scraping the web.

4. Clear documentation

As I mentioned before, an API’s documentation is the manual that helps developers get a better understanding of how the API works and how they can integrate it with their project.

Creating the most innovative API is meaningless if it lacks good documentation, and it tends to be somewhat frustrating for developers to play the guessing game on how to use an API.

The documentation doesn’t need to be dense, as presenting the main functions of the API and how each method works is enough.

5. Good error handling

Good error handling is an essential matter for a developer’s experience. An API takes care of this topic, telling the developer if something went astray and what exactly went wrong with his request. Getting a simple “Oops! Something went wrong…” message isn’t going to help anybody, so a good API must be communicative.

Error responses that don’t provide aid for developers usually drive them away and they won’t use said API anymore. Using the correct status code and providing a human-readable message can help fix the issue at hand faster.

What do you think? Would you give APIs a try?

I hope this article gave you a complete perspective on why APIs are a developer’s perfect fit for web crawling. They can relieve you of many roadblocks and traps set by websites to prevent you from scraping their pages.

Integrating an API with your project isn’t hard if you’ve got a bit of coding knowledge and a clear documentation. And if you don’t, it is worth your while to invest time into it.

If you’re still on the fence, why not try it yourself by scraping some websites with the 1000 free API calls provided by WebScrapingAPI.