Are you looking for the best proxy scrapers that will scrape free proxies from the Internet for you to use? Then come in now and discover some of the best proxy scrapers available both for coders and non-coders.
Many Internet marketers cannot do without proxies. If they are not using proxies for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), they are using it for monitoring their competitors, protecting their brand, keeping their Internet footprint anonymous, or simply carrying out marketing research.
For marketers that do not use proxies directly, they most likely have used a service that uses proxies. That is how useful proxies are. Unfortunately, most high-quality proxies come with a price tag on them. Depending on your project size, this could take a chunk of your money. Interestingly, there are free proxies out there that you can use for many Internet marketing tasks.
Finding these free proxies can be daunting as you will need a good number of them; run them through tests to make sure they have the quality and features that will make them useful for your tasks. A good number of them are bad quality, and you need them tested and filtered out else, your project will be ruined.
The process of finding and testing them can be repetitive, time-consuming, and uninspiring. Fortunately for you, you can automate the process using proxy scrapers.
Free Proxies are dead fast and slow speed, Right? Do you tired of testing public proxies with a proxy scraper? We would recommend you use paid proxy services to save valuable time,
- Private Proxies: Highproxies, Myprivateproxy, and InstantProxies
- Residential Proxies: Luminati, Soax.io, Shifter, and Smartproxy
In this article, you will be learning about the best proxy scrapers you can use. Some of them are free while some are paid. Some are meant to be installed as standalone software, while some are scripts meant for use by coders or techies.
What is a Proxy Scraper?
A proxy scraper is a specialized web scraping tool developed to help marketers extract proxy details from websites that publish lists of free proxies. This definition does not capture all of the features of a proxy scraper. Some proxy scrapers scan ports to discover misconfigured servers that could be used as potential proxies.
Aside from just extracting these details, proxy scrapers also have proxy testing tools in place in other to make sure that the proxies work. Proxy scrapers are automation bots that automate the process of finding free proxies, testing them, and making them available to users.
While I stated above that free proxies are blocked on most websites, you need to know that not all free proxies are blocked. In fact, there are some high-quality free proxies that you can use for accessing Google and many other popular websites with anti-spam systems.
However, they do not come easy to find and still are not reliable. That is why you need to constantly look out for free proxies because the ones you are currently using will be inactive or bad without notice. One feature I like in Proxy scrapers is their support for filtering, which makes it easy to pick out proxies that meet certain criteria.
Best Proxy Scrapers in the Market
There are a good number of proxy scrapers in the market with different levels of effectiveness. While a good number of them come with a price tag on them, others are free to use – just like the proxies they scrape.
There is also the issue of platform support as some are installable as a standalone desktop application while others are scripts. The list will be divided into two – software and scripts.
Best Proxy Scraper Software for Scraping Free Proxies
The proxy scrapers that will be discussed below are standalone software with Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). These can be used by anybody as it does not require any technical knowledge in other to use it. Most of these are paid, and a good number of them do not even have free trials available.
GSA Proxy Scraper
GSA Proxy Scraper is one of the best proxy scraping software in the market. It is available on the Windows Operating System (OS). You can use it to harvest thousands of free proxies quickly and reliably test them in an effective manner. From GSA Proxy Scraper, you can get free proxies for your daily tasks scrapped from thousands of sources.
You do not need to add proxies for GSA Proxy Scraper as it scrapes proxies for its own internal proxy usage. GSA Proxy Scraper has a tool with which you can filter unwanted proxies, rank websites, and emulate the Google Page Rank. One tool you will come to appreciate is the port scanner that can help you find free proxies not publicly available on free proxy websites.
- Is It Possible to Find Reliable and Working Public Proxies?
- How to Build a Free Proxy Pool by Yourself?
ScrapeBox Proxy Harvester
The Proxy Harvester tool in ScrapeBox will help you scrape and test proxies. It has excellent filtering support that allows you to filter proxy lists based on country, speed, and port. While it has its own sources for scraping proxies, it is fully configurable, and you can add your own sources. This software works only on Windows.
ZennoProxyChecker
The ZennoProxyChecker software is easy to use but powerful proxy scraper that you can use to automatically search the Internet and extract free proxy details for you to use in your Internet marketing tasks. Just like the other tools described above, the ZennoProxyChecker is a paid tool but provides a free trial option in the form of a demo.
This tool does not only check for available proxies; it runs them through different tests and presents them to you ready for use. It has a unique algorithm for optimizing proxy parsing, has an anti-bot system that bypasses blocks on free proxy listing sites, and you can integrate their proxies directly into your other applications. This tool has been around for over 12 years and only support Windows.
Somiibo Proxy Scraper
Somiibo is an automation tool developer known in the social media automation space. Interestingly, it has a proxy scraper that makes it easy for you to find, test, and use free proxies. With the Somiibo Proxy Scraper, you can scrape thousands of free proxies checked thoroughly for quality in a fast and efficient manner.
This tool has support for exporting the proxies it finds into a variety of file formats, including CSV, Excel, Google Sheet, and even PDF. One thing you need to understand is that even though they claim their proxies are safe to use, you will have to take it with a pinch of salt and treat them like the free proxies that they are.
IP Proxy Scraper
Unlike the other proxy scrapers described above, the IP Proxy Scraper is free and can be downloaded from SourceForge. It has support for both Windows and Linux. The Windows software download link is here – While that of Linux is here.
The tool is lightweight and one of the easiest to use on the list. It comes with a simple Interface yet has powerful features that make it a strong contender. The IP Proxy Scraper has a list of redefined sites it scrapes proxies from. However, if you have any other site you want to include, you can do that easily.
Proxy List Scraper (Chrome Extension)
The Proxy List Scraper is a Google Chrome browser extension that you can use to extract free proxies from websites you visit. Unlike the other software above that are standalone applications, the Proxy List Scraper is not a standalone application and works only in the Chrome browser environment.
How this one work is simple – you visit a site that has free and activates it to do its job. This proxy scraper has support for exporting proxies in few formats. One thing you will come to like about this Chrome browser extension is that it is easy to use. The major problem with it is that it is not regularly updated.
You may be like to read,
ProxyDB Proxy Scraper (Online / Web)
If you have tried searching for free proxies online manually, chances are you have come across the ProxyDB website. Interestingly, aside from providing free proxies, it also has support for helping you to scrape proxies from other websites. The proxy scraper tool is very basic but quite effective.
All that is required is for you to enter the URL of the page containing the free proxies, and the tool will scrape them for you. the tool is publicly available online and free to use.
Free Proxy Scrapers for Coders
If you are a coder looking forward to incorporating proxy scrapers into your custom application, then this section of the article is for you. We will be discussing a few proxy scraping libraries you can use as a coder, depending on the programming language you have an interest in.
Proxy Scraper (Python)
Are you a python programmer developing client-based applications or writing an automation bot that needs streams of proxies, and you want to use free proxies? With the Proxy Scraper library, you can get that done programmatically. This library is available on GitHub – click here to visit the library page on GitHub.
The library has a list of defined proxy sites it scrapes proxies from. The script is fast, and you can scrape over 1K proxies within 2 minutes – thanks to its multithread support. This tool also has support for checking the proxies on specific to determine if they work or not, with the Google search homepage being the default.
Related,
- Python Web Scraping Libraries and Framework
- How to Build a Simple Web Scraper with Python
- Web Scraping Using Selenium and Python
Proxy Scraper (PHP)
If you are a PHP developer, you can download the Proxy Scraper for PHP here. This is a library for scraping free proxies from websites that provide a list of free proxies on the Internet. But that is not all it does – the PHP Proxy Scraper comes with other tools, including the validator to check if a certain proxy server is working or not.
It also provides you metric data about each proxy. You can integrate this library into your PHP application, and they will provide you access to an endless stream of IP addresses with which you can evade detection provided they are functional.
Simple Proxy Scraper (Node.js/JavaScript)
From the name of this proxy scraper, you can tell that it is a simple scraper. And yes, it is quite simple, lightweight, and streamlined. It only has support for ProxyScrape. This is unlike the other tools above that have support for a good number of websites. This tool does not check whether the proxies it scrapes are active or not.
However, it has filters that can help you reach the proxies that are beneficial to you easily. You can integrate it with your Node.js application.
Proxy Scraper (Perl)
Perl is not very popular when compared to the other languages described above. However, it is used for automation, and as such, there is a proxy scraping library available for Perl.
You can check the link to the library here. This library works like the way other libraries described above work – it scrapes proxies from free proxy list websites.
Free Proxies: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
The experienced proxy user knows that free proxies are a pain to deal with. To use them, they will have to carefully select them based on certain filters, and even with that, problems can still creep in. however, the newbie marketer and the proxy user is happy anytime he hears that he could avoid paying for proxies and get them for free.
The only good thing about free proxies is that they are free.
They are open proxies and require no authentication. For these reasons, free proxies are being shared by many people, and that is where the problem arises. They are slow, have been blacklisted on many websites on the Internet, and can ruin your project.
The ugly aspect of free proxies is that they could get you vulnerable to security and privacy breach. It might interest you to know that most free proxies are possible because of computer/server misconfigurations, which makes them hackable and proxies provided. However, some are set up by hackers to eavesdrop on requests and steal your data.
To avoid giving your sensitive data out to some hackers over the Internet because of the need to use proxies without paying for them, I will advise you not to use free proxies to access sites that you will transmit sensitive details such as login details and credit card/payment details.
Generally, most free proxies are not encrypted; some alter HTML and JavaScript codes either to steal your cookies or to ingest advertisements into web pages.
FAQs About Proxy Scraper
-
Scraping API Vs. Proxy Scraper?
While a good number of users on the Internet search this on Google, we do not know why the comparison in the first place. This is because they are completely not related.
A Scraping API is an API service that helps you evade anti-scraping systems by rotating proxies, solving Captcha, handling headless browsers. Scraping APIs are sometimes known as proxy API. They are different from proxy scrapers that find free proxies on the Internet.
Freemium Scraping API: ScrapingBee, Scraper API and Proxycrawl
-
Why Should I Not Use Free Proxies?
You need to have a second thought before using free proxies. There are affordable proxies you can make use of that are more secure and effective than free proxies.
Free proxies are usually not secure; they are not reliable and not compatible with many websites on the Internet. Also important is the fact that some of them eavesdrop on your Internet traffic, alter HTML and ingest JavaScript codes for advertisement and some malicious reasons.
-
Which Proxies Should You Use Instead?
Instead of using free proxies that could compromise your privacy and security, you can go for affordable proxies. For datacenter proxies, you can buy high-quality private proxies from InstantProxies – $10 for 10 IPs. MyPrivateProxy and SquidProxies also sell affordable datacenter proxies. For Residential proxies, you can buy cheap residential proxy providers from Smartproxy, Proxy-cheap, and Stormproxies.
Conclusion
As a way of concluding this article, it is important I stress here again that using free proxies is not advisable. If you must use them, make sure you are not using them for tasks that you will transmit sensitive details such as login details and credit card information.
Even without these issues, you will have to deal with their unreliable nature, slow speed, and the fact that they get easily detected and blocked.
