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A proxy is an intermediary server that routes your request through its own IP address before it reaches the destination. So what are proxies used for? Far more than hiding a single IP. People use them for privacy and access, and businesses use them for scraping, monitoring, and market intelligence. This guide covers both, plus how to pick the right type.

Web scraping with Perl is popular for elite text processing and superior execution speed. Perl has first-class regex built right into the language, no imports, no setup, which makes extracting structured data fast and precise. In this guide, you'll go from a Perl HTTP request to a scraper that fetches and parses web data, handles sessions, and exports data.

An Apache proxy server can work in two directions. As a forward proxy, it sits between your client and the internet, hiding who's making the request. As a reverse proxy, it sits in front of your backend servers, hiding what's running behind them. Apache HTTP Server handles both well, and it's already installed on most Linux boxes, has a mature module ecosystem, and costs nothing. This guide walks you through setting up both modes from scratch, configuring a reverse proxy in front of Tomcat, and routing Selenium scraper traffic through your forward proxy.

The best web scraping proxies stop your scraper from getting rate-limited, CAPTCHA-walled, or banned outright. Pick the wrong one and the blocks start within minutes. What works depends on your target, your scale, and your budget. This guide walks through the proxy types, how to choose, the providers worth knowing, and how to actually run them.

Kasada is a bot-mitigation service protecting ticketing, limited-release retail, and financial platforms. Unlike Cloudflare, Akamai, or HUMAN, it shows no CAPTCHA and runs a proof-of-work challenge that a real browser solves by loading the page. A Kasada bypass, therefore, starts with a browser, not an HTTP client. This guide covers detection, the 5 layers, the tools, and the DIY limit.

A SOCKS proxy is an internet protocol that routes network traffic through a third-party server and masks your IP address. It operates at the transport layer, handling any traffic type – TCP, UDP, web, gaming, torrenting, and more – without inspecting or modifying the data. In this blog entry, we’ll cover the ins and outs of SOCKS proxies, including how they work, key benefits, use cases, and how they compare against HTTP proxies.

Web scraping with Linux is more capable than most people expect. Bash may not be the go-to tool for web scraping, but with a handful of pre-installed command-line utilities you can build a working scraper without touching Python or a browser. This guide covers how to make HTTP requests in Linux, parse into HTML and JSON, set up proxy support with Decodo, and build a fully working Bash-based scraper from scratch.

Perplexity is slowly becoming one of the more prominent LLMs in 2026 because it delivers output in a unique way that sets it apart from the rest. When you send a prompt, Perplexity AI will return a direct answer, along with cited sources (URLs and titles), related follow-up questions to that prompt, and supporting images as well. All this information can be worth tracking for businesses that care about their brand visibility, and how Perplexity is representing them and their competitors to a typical user.

Python and JavaScript are 2 languages that dominate web scraping, but for different reasons. The real question isn't which language is "better," but rather what task you're building for. This article compares both languages in terms of libraries, performance, support for dynamic content, and anti-bot strategies, while also showing why the overall architecture matters more than your language choice.

When you need to get cookies in Playwright and reuse them across runs, the key concept is the browser context. Cookies live in the context, not the page. Getting cookies in Playwright starts with the context.cookies() method, and returns every cookie stored in the browser context, which you can save and load from a file later. This guide walks through how to get, save, and load cookies in Playwright.

Headless browsers in Playwright can leak fingerprint signals that anti-bot systems notice. While Playwright is great for automation, its default settings make these signals easy to spot. Stealth plugins help cover these leaks so your scripts look like real user traffic. This guide explains detection methods, how to set up stealth in Python and Node.js, what gets patched, how to test, and the limits and scaling options.

A 502 bad gateway error means a gateway or proxy contacted an upstream server but didn't receive a valid response. The issue usually sits somewhere in the server path, not on your device. This guide explains what 502 means, why it happens, how to diagnose it, and how to fix it as a visitor, developer, or operator.

Rebrowser is an open-source project that patches Playwright and Puppeteer to strip the automation signals that anti-bot systems detect. Its main target is the Runtime.Enable CDP command, which both libraries call by default and which vendors flag as automation. This article explains what the patches change, how to install and run them, and how to pair rebrowser with proxies.

Knowing how to wait for a page to load in Playwright is the difference between a scraper that returns clean data and one that fails silently. In this guide, you'll learn how to handle waiting in Playwright, including how it behaves in a headless browser environment, covering auto-waiting, selectors, network events, timeouts, custom conditions, and error handling across dynamic pages.

Undetected ChromeDriver is a Python library that patches Selenium’s ChromeDriver to avoid bot detection when web scraping. Standard Selenium ChromeDriver is blocked by most protected websites within the first few requests: anti-bot services like Cloudflare, DataDome, and HUMAN (formerly PerimeterX) read automation flags, WebDriver properties, and browser-fingerprint gaps before the first page finishes loading. The undetected_chromedriver library works as a drop-in Selenium WebDriver replacement (swap webdriver.Chrome() for uc.Chrome()) and reduces those signals. But it does not hide your IP address, so this guide also shows how to pair it with residential proxies and behavioral techniques to stay unblocked.

Bing scraping is the automated extraction of rankings, ads, snippets, and search features from Bing's SERPs. Since Microsoft retired all official Bing Search APIs in 2025, scraping and third-party SERP APIs are the main ways to access this data programmatically. This guide covers Python-based approaches using Requests, Beautiful Soup, Playwright, and Decodo's Web Scraping API.

In June 2026, bot traffic vs human traffic flipped for the first time. Cloudflare Radar measured 57.4% of web requests as automated and 42.6% as human. AI tools drove the change. This article breaks down where bots dominate, which countries skew human, and what businesses building or buying AI tools should do about it.

JSON is the format that most web APIs and modern websites use to send their data. This tutorial shows how to scrape JSON data in Python – fetching it, parsing it, modifying it, and exporting clean files. You'll also learn about the tools for messy or oversized responses, and how to get data when sites block you with fingerprinting.