📅 2024-08-13 — Session: Automated Web Scraping and Proxy Management
🕒 16:30–21:10
🏷️ Labels: Web Scraping, Automation, Proxy Management, Google Search, Python
📂 Project: Dev
⭐ Priority: MEDIUM
Session Goal
The session aimed to enhance the automation of web scraping tasks, focusing on Google search result parsing and proxy management to avoid errors and improve efficiency.
Key Activities
- Developed a Python script to automate the extraction of social media profile links from Google search results using concurrent processing with
ThreadPoolExecutor. - Explored strategies to prevent Google CAPTCHA and 429 errors during automated searches by using rotating proxies, increasing sleep intervals, and implementing exponential backoff.
- Created a robust URL parsing method using
urllib.parse.quote_plusfor encoding search URLs in a pandas DataFrame. - Implemented a function to test HTTP proxies and troubleshoot proxy connection timeout issues.
Achievements
- Successfully automated the parsing of Google search results, improving the efficiency of extracting social media profiles.
- Developed a comprehensive strategy to handle Google CAPTCHA and 429 errors, ensuring smoother automated scraping operations.
- Enhanced proxy management by testing and troubleshooting proxy connectivity, leading to more reliable web scraping tasks.
Pending Tasks
- Further testing and optimization of proxy strategies to ensure minimal disruptions during automated requests.
- Exploration of additional error handling techniques to further reduce the occurrence of 429 errors.