Search giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing made their empire on scraping others content. However, they don’t want you to scrape them. How ironic, isn’t it?

Search engine performance is a very important metric all digital marketers want to measure and improve. I’m sure you will be using some great SEO tools to check how your keywords perform. All great SEO tool comes with a search keyword ranking feature. The tools will tell you how your keywords are performing in google, yahoo bing etc.

How will you get data from search engines If you want to build a keyword ranking app?

These search engines have API’s but the daily query limit is very low and not useful for the commercial purpose. The only solution is to scrape search results. Search engine giants obviously know this :). Once they know that you are scraping, they will block your IP, Period!

How do Search engines detect bots?

Here are the common methods of detection of bots.

* IP address: Search engines can detect if there are too many requests coming from a single IP. If a high amount of traffic is detected, they will throw a captcha.

* Search patterns: Search engines match traffic patterns to an existing set of patterns and if there is huge variation, they will classify this as a bot.

If you don’t have access to sophisticated technology, it is impossible to scrape search engines like google, Bing or Yahoo.

How to avoid detection

There are some things you can do to avoid detection.

Scrape slowly and don’t try to squeeze everything at once. Switch user agents between queries Scrape randomly and don’t follow the same pattern Use intelligent IP rotations Clear Cookies after each IP change or disable them completely

Thanks for reading this blog post. Datahut offers affordable data extraction services (DaaS) . If you need help with your web scraping projects let us know and we will be glad to help.