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XPath and CSS selectors are essential tools for targeting elements within a webpage's DOM. This guide offers a side-by-side comparison, showing how to use both for node selection, position-based selection, and attribute selection. It also covers XPath axes for navigating the DOM and highlights key operators and functions for advanced manipulation. Whether you're a web developer, tester, or scraper, this guide provides practical examples to help you efficiently work with XPath and CSS selectors.

Choosing the right proxy—residential, datacenter, or mobile—depends on your needs. Residential proxies offer high anonymity and accurate geolocation but are more expensive and slower. Datacenter proxies are cost-effective and fast but more detectable and less geographically precise. Mobile proxies provide high anonymity and dynamic IPs, ideal for mobile-specific tasks, though they come at a higher cost and can have variable speeds. Select based on your priorities: anonymity, speed, or mobile access.

Error 403, or "Forbidden," means your access request was blocked. Common causes include IP blocking, User-Agent restrictions, geographic limits, and authentication needs. Always respect robots.txt, throttle request rates, and check response headers for clues. These steps can help you bypass Error 403 and continue scraping efficiently.

Slow Selenium tests can be sped up by optimizing locators, using explicit waits, running tests in parallel, and configuring browsers for better performance. Simplify locators, switch to headless mode, and manage test data efficiently. Regularly monitor and analyze performance to address any slowdowns.

Cloudflare’s human verification methods, such as CAPTCHAs and JavaScript challenges, aim to block bots. Some attempt to bypass these using tools like automated solvers, headless browsers, and proxies. However, doing so can have legal and ethical consequences. Maintaining security involves adhering to best practices and staying current with cybersecurity trends.

On this blog, we will list the web scraping challenges and give users tips on how they can overcome them.

On this blog, we will tackle the limitations of Selenium

This blog will help users understand the workaround when it comes to CAPTCHAS

Listed are the best alternatives to Axios for API Requests

Understanding Error 1006: Causes and Solutions

Selenium vs. BeautifulSoup: Choosing the Right Web Scraping Tool

This blog will include what is error 1015, how to avoid it, what you can do about it.

How to read robots.txt and useful web scraping practices

Recently we completed a full database migration from PlanetScale to Amazon RDS. While numerous blog posts cover database migrations, this post aims to delve beyond the technical intricacies and into the background on why we moved and how our experience has made us lose trust in database startups.

Ever wanted to scrape a website for valuable data and then got disappointed when you suddenly realized that it is using Cloudflare? Well, there is no longer any need to be discouraged, as there is a practical solution to this problem, and it is called FlareSolverr.

Do you want to know how to use a custom user agent with GNU Wget? In this article, we cover exactly that so that you can utilise a custom user agent on the command line or via configuration files.

Explore why canvas fingerprinting means your browsing activity has become more detectable than ever.

In today's post, we show you how to scrape all the eBay listings for a particular eBay search using our brand new GridPanel Scraping API!

Want to learn how to use a mobile proxy with the Java library OkHttp? This is the post for you.

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