Book Image

Go Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

By : Vincent Smith
Book Image

Go Web Scraping Quick Start Guide

By: Vincent Smith

Overview of this book

Web scraping is the process of extracting information from the web using various tools that perform scraping and crawling. Go is emerging as the language of choice for scraping using a variety of libraries. This book will quickly explain to you, how to scrape data data from various websites using Go libraries such as Colly and Goquery. The book starts with an introduction to the use cases of building a web scraper and the main features of the Go programming language, along with setting up a Go environment. It then moves on to HTTP requests and responses and talks about how Go handles them. You will also learn about a number of basic web scraping etiquettes. You will be taught how to navigate through a website, using a breadth-first and then a depth-first search, as well as find and follow links. You will get to know about the ways to track history in order to avoid loops and to protect your web scraper using proxies. Finally the book will cover the Go concurrency model, and how to run scrapers in parallel, along with large-scale distributed web scraping.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Virtual private servers

When you make an HTTP request for a website, you are making a direct connection between your computer and the targeted server. By doing this, you are providing them with your machine's public IP address, which can be used to determine your general location, and your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Although this can't be tied directly back to your exact location, it could be used maliciously if its finds its way into the wrong hands. With this in mind, it is preferable to not expose any of your personal assets to untrusted servers.

Running your web scraper on a computer that is far removed from your physical location, with some sort of remote access, is a good way to decouple your web scraper from your personal computer. You can rent Virtual Private Server (VPS) instances from various providers on the web.

Some of the more notable companies include...