Use Cases
Web Scraping
Extract structured data from websites
Overview
Web scraping lets you extract structured data from websites. Browserbase provides a reliable browser infrastructure that helps you build scrapers that can:
- Scale without infrastructure management
- Maintain consistent performance
- Avoid bot detection and CAPTCHAs with Browserbase’s stealth mode
- Provide debugging and monitoring tools with session replays and live views
This guide will help you get started with web scraping on Browserbase and highlight best practices.
Scraping a website
Using a sample website, we’ll scrape the title, price, and some other details of books from the website.
Follow Along: Web Scraping Example
Step-by-step code for web scraping
Code Example
Playwright
Example output
Best Practices for Web Scraping
Follow these best practices to build reliable, efficient, and ethical web scrapers with Browserbase.
Ethical Scraping
- Respect robots.txt: Check the website’s robots.txt file for crawling guidelines
- Rate limiting: Implement reasonable delays between requests (2-5 seconds)
- Terms of Service: Review the website’s terms of service before scraping
- Data usage: Only collect and use data in accordance with the website’s policies
Performance Optimization
- Batch processing: Process multiple pages in batches with concurrent sessions
- Selective scraping: Only extract the data you need
- Resource management: Close browser sessions promptly after use
- Connection reuse: Reuse browsers for sequential scraping tasks
Stealth and Anti-Bot Avoidance
- Enable Browserbase Advanced Stealth mode: Helps avoid bot detection
- Randomize behavior: Add variable delays between actions
- Use proxies: Rotate IPs to distribute requests
- Mimic human interaction: Add realistic mouse movements and delays
- Handle CAPTCHAs: Enable Browserbase’s automatic CAPTCHA solving
Next Steps
Now that you understand the basics of web scraping with Browserbase, here are some features to explore next:
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