In our blog, we not only write about privacy technologies, but also talk about the real use of Infatica to solve business problems. Today we will talk about the use of resident proxies in the field of Data Mining.
What is Data Mining?
Data mining (or date mining) is the process of identifying facts that are useful to business, patterns and other insights based on the analysis of large amounts of data (Big Data). In addition to, in fact, algorithms and tools for data analysis, the key task is to collect the necessary amount of information for further mining.
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One of the most popular methods of data collection in the past few years is downloading data from websites that meet the necessary criteria. This process is called web scrapping, and in its implementation companies face a number of difficulties.
Which industries use web scraping?
The short answer is everywhere where data analysis allows you to make more efficient business decisions. For example, in the field of e-commerce, companies monitor price changes on competitors' sites — this allows them to flexibly change the cost of goods and publish marketing campaigns in order to poach customers.
Data from different sites and from social networks is also collected for research and ask sentiments of potential buyers (sentiment analysis).
Marketers collect information about advertising campaigns of competitors - which ads and on which sites they publish, how they differ for different regions within one country or in the whole world.
Web Scraping Challenges
The number of companies using this data collection method has increased hundreds of times in recent years. Most organizations use web scraping to analyze competitor activity or market research.
As a rule, "scrapping" is implemented using specialized software. In essence, this is a robot that enters the site and downloads content from it. And since this is a fairly common practice and the leaders of many companies already know about it, there are often cases of opposition to this method of data collection.
If a competing company recognizes a scraper, it can block it or, in some cases, specifically display for it deliberately incorrect information. As a result, you can get incorrect data for analysis, make false conclusions, which will lead to serious losses for the business.
Therefore, it is important to counteract attempts to block or falsify data for the mining date. This can be done using resident proxies.
How resident proxies help for mining date tasks: Infatica case
How to avoid detection of your activity on data collection and the subsequent blocking or their falsification? First of all, you need to understand how web-scraping detection systems work in general.
Most often, they detect scraper robots and block them based on their IP address. In many cases, such systems use the so-called server IP, which provide hosting companies with companies. It is easy to find out if a specific address belongs to a pool of a particular provider: this information is indicated in the ASN number associated with a specific IP. There are many services for automatic checking, they are actively used by the anti-bot system. They can easily block the treatment of server IP.
It is much more difficult to do this in the case of resident proxies. Residents call IP-addresses that Internet providers issue to homeowners, they are noted in the databases of regional Internet registries (RIR). Resident proxies use exactly such IP, so requests from them are indistinguishable from those sent by real users.
Thus, using the Infatica resident proxy rotation engine will allow you to bypass the protection from web scraping - the connections will come from different addresses, and for the server they will all look like requests from regular users. And nobody will block potential business customers.
More than 100 countries and regions are available in the
Infatica system. Therefore, our customers from the sphere of Data Mining can collect data in different regions without causing suspicion of anti-scrapping systems.