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Googles new mandate that all search requests must be rendered withJavaScripthas sent shockwaves through the scraping community.
The industry is rethinking its infrastructure, and finding the right web data collection solution might become even harder.
But whats the real impact users felt?
Partnerships & Performance Marketing Lead, Smartproxy.
What happened?
No more simple HTTP requests and plainHTMLparsing the days of old-school scraping are over.
Google claims the change is about better-protecting users and preventing abuse, but the impact goes much deeper.
Volatility in search refers to how often and how drastically search results change for a given query.
Data lags, outages, and skyrocketing error rates became the norm.
But as any savvy team in web data projects knows, challenges are opportunities in disguise.
Surge of headless browsers
Scrapers that once relied solely on basic HTTP clients have had to evolve.
Switching to headless browsers like Playwright or Selenium isnt just a nice-to-have its now essential.
These tools mimic real-user behavior by fully executing JavaScript, ensuring that every dynamic element is captured.
However, theres a catch: headless browsers are resource-intensive.
They require more CPU and memory, leading to higher operational costs.
Its a significant increase in resource usage."
a user on the HackerNews forum.
Advanced scraping solutions
This industry-wide shakeup has also accelerated the adoption of robust proxy and web data collection solutions.
High-quality residential and ISP proxies have become critical components in any scalable scraping operation.
For teams looking for a ready-made scraping infrastructure, scraping APIs are stepping up.
Here are a few key insights from the past month:
What does the future hold?
Googles decision to require JavaScript isnt a temporary hiccup its a sign of things to come.
a user on the HackerNews forum.
If youre still using outdated scraping methods, it might be time to consider a switch.
We’ve listed the best fest free proxies.
The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc.
