Company
Date Published
Author
Roel Peters
Word count
1602
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini rely heavily on vast amounts of content acquired through web scraping, a method also useful for market analysis, price monitoring, and lead generation. Two popular tools for web scraping are Scrapy and Puppeteer, each with unique strengths and purposes. Scrapy, a Python-based framework, excels in efficiently scraping large volumes of static web pages with its asynchronous capabilities and extensive feature set, including middleware and anti-bot measures. In contrast, Puppeteer, a Node.js-based headless browser emulation framework, is ideal for interacting with dynamic web content, as it fully renders pages and enables user interactivity such as clicking buttons or submitting forms. While Scrapy is preferable for static content due to its speed and scalability, Puppeteer is suited for dynamic pages that require full browser emulation. Both tools have active communities and community-supported plugins, with Scrapy offering more structured project frameworks and Puppeteer providing flexibility in code structuring. Despite their differing approaches, they can be integrated using the scrapy-pyppeteer module for comprehensive web scraping tasks. Bright Data offers a robust tool stack for industrializing web scraping efforts, including proxies and APIs, along with detailed documentation for both Puppeteer and Scrapy.