How resident proxies help in business: a real case of using Infatica in Data Mining
In our blog we not only write about privacy technologies, but also talk about the real application of the Infatica service to solve business problems. Today we will focus on the use of resident proxy service in the field of Data Mining.
What is Data Mining
Data Mining (or data mining) is the process of identifying facts, patterns, and other insights useful for a business based on an 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.
One of the most popular ways of collecting data in the last few years is to download it from websites that meet the necessary criteria. This process is called web scrapping, and its implementation, companies face a number of difficulties.
Which industries use web scraping
The short answer is wherever data analysis allows you to make more effective business decisions. For example, in the field of electronic commerce, companies monitor price changes on competitors' websites - this allows you to flexibly change the cost of goods and publish marketing campaigns in order to lure customers.
Data from different sites and from social networks is also collected for research and ask the sentiment of potential buyers (sentiment analysis).
Marketers collect information about competitors' advertising campaigns - which ads and on which sites they publish, how they differ for different regions within the same country or in the whole world.
Web Scraping Challenges
The number of companies using this method of data collection has grown hundreds of times in recent years. Most organizations use web scraping to analyze competitor activity or market research.
As a rule, “scraping” is implemented using specialized software. In fact, this is a robot that visits 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 robot, it can block it or, in some cases, intentionally display information that is obviously incorrect to it. As a result, you can get the wrong data for analysis, make false conclusions that 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 the detection of your data collection activity and subsequent blocking or falsification? First of all, you need to understand how web scraping detection systems work in general.
Most often, they identify robot scrapers and block them based on their IP address. In many cases, such systems use the so-called server IP, which provide hosting companies to companies. It is easy to find out if a particular address belongs to a pool of a specific provider: information about this is indicated in the ASN number associated with a specific IP. There are many services for automatic verification; they are actively used by anti-bot systems. It is not difficult for them to block access from server IP.
It is much more difficult to do this when using resident proxies. Resident names are IP addresses that Internet providers issue to homeowners; they are noted in the databases of regional Internet registers (RIRs). Resident proxies use just such IPs, so requests from them are indistinguishable from those sent by real users.
Thus, using the rotation mechanism of the Infatica resident proxies will bypass protection against web scraping - connections will come from different addresses, and for the server they will all look like requests from ordinary users. And nobody will block potential business customers.
In the Infatica systemmore than 100 countries and regions are available. Therefore, our customers in the field of Data Mining can collect data in different regions without causing suspicion of anti-scraping systems.