Companies often scrape websites for data on market trends and competitors. Scraping secure websites on a medium or large scale is challenging because of the risk of getting blocked.
Proxy servers are a powerful and legitimate tool to bypass restrictions and scrape the web. When it comes to this activity, residential proxies provide users with anonymity and are one of the most difficult to blacklist.
Business Use Cases for a Residential Proxy
An ISP-issued IP address shows that the device using it comes from an actual residential location. A residential proxy holds this IP, therefore offering a greater degree of usability than types of proxy servers. Read on for four uses for residential proxies.
Tracking Customers’ Reviews
It’s crucial for companies to monitor the reviews customers leave of competitors in the field. Doing so allows them to see what others are doing right and vice versa. With this information, they’ll be able to formulate better products and services to gain a more significant market share.
However, scraping sites for reviews can be a tedious undertaking, especially when done manually. With residential proxies and bots, you can scan and collect massive amounts of data in real time. Masking your IP address with another residential one will help your data gathering process go undetected. Without worrying about IP bans, residential proxies can continuously collect vast amounts of public data from review sites worldwide, whether it be with Germany proxies or ones from China.
Enhancing Cybersecurity
In 2020, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 790,000 reports of alleged cybercrime in the United States, leading to over $4.2 billion in losses. Internet criminals often resort to deceptive email campaigns known as phishing to trick unsuspecting victims into giving up personal information. Enterprises can benefit from the use of proxies in the following ways:
- Brand/Identity Theft Protection
Defending your company’s name and reputation from imposters is part of the brand protection process. Web scrapers combined with proxies can help businesses uncover counterfeit sites and unlicensed vendors profiting from selling counterfeit goods. Types of trademark infringement include:
- Counterfeiting
- Copyright infringement
- Trademark infringement
- Design infringement
- Patent theft
- Email Protection
By hiding their clients’ actual IP addresses, residential proxies can monitor all incoming and outgoing emails for malicious content or links. You can check the best proxy reviews to find the most suitable proxy provider for this purpose.
- Malware Protection
Cybercriminals create malicious software, also known as malware, for the express purpose of committing cybercrime, such as stealing information or destroying computers. Popular malware forms include Trojan viruses, worms, and spyware. You can use proxy servers to prevent malware from infecting your system. They can also prevent users from accessing malicious websites.
Getting Real-Time Pricing Data
When a business wants to make price changes and service enhancements appropriate for its industry, it needs access to timely market data. For example, websites for hotels and airlines often use JavaScript-based rendering because it allows for greater website interactivity. Web crawlers that scrape only static HTML elements have trouble with dynamic content.
Due to IP restrictions, hotel, airline, and event ticket price scraping is challenging. Booking platforms keep tabs on user activity and shut down requests from suspicious IP addresses. Scraping projects frequently run into issues with data that differs from country to country. A residential proxy service can access and collect data, regardless of location, promising more accurate pricing information.
Extracting Search Engine Data (Scraping)
Yahoo, Google, and Yandex all take slightly different approaches to detecting and blocking web scraping bots. So, modifying your scraping system for search engines is essential if you don’t want it to fail. You can use a residential proxy to bypass filters. When you employ this tool for web scraping, it will mask your actual IP address with its own, allowing you to continue gathering data without receiving a pesky block.
Conclusion
With proxies, you can send multiple data requests at once. However, there are some areas where extra caution is required. The frequency of your requests is crucial and shouldn’t be too high. To avoid a block, set a reasonable timeout, say 1 to 2 minutes. Also, remember it’s counterproductive to flood the servers with requests. You’ll not have access for long if you try to retrieve a large amount of data simultaneously.
