Elevate Your Knowledge:
The Pinobyte Blog
Trends, strategies, and actionable advice on web scraping, data engineering and AI.
Session Cookies for Scraping: Warm Up Once, Then Send Thousands of Fast Requests
Session cookies for scraping can turn a browser from the main extraction engine into a short setup step.
Firecrawl vs a Custom Scraping Engine: Which Fits Your Use Case in 2026?
Firecrawl vs a custom scraping engine is a choice between fast access and source-specific ownership.
Build a Claude Web Scraping Skill in 10 Minutes
You can build a reusable Claude web scraping skill in about 10 minutes for public, permitted, uncomplicated pages. Give Claude five rules:
Web Scraping: Build In-House vs Buy an API vs Hire a Team (2026 Framework)
Building a scraper, buying an API, and hiring a managed team move cost and operational risk to different owners. This 2026 framework compares all three across small, medium, and large workloads without reducing the decision to a price list.
Scraping Cloudflare and DataDome Without a Browser Using curl_cffi
Across Pinobyte's hard-target work, curl_cffi handled about 80% of protected resources after engineers tested several impersonation profiles instead of stopping at the default. In one Cloudflare run, chrome produced almost no usable responses while firefox144 reached about 80% under matched request and IP conditions. Profiles such as chrome, chrome120, and firefox144 select different browser connection patterns. Test a small profile matrix before paying the cost of a browser.
Running a Large-Scale Web-Scraping Aggregator in Production
A behind-the-scenes look at how we built and ran a distributed car-listing aggregator for a client — 1M+ live listings, 500k+ requests a day, and the anti-bot, fingerprinting and monitoring problems we solved to keep it running in production.
Best Web Scraping Tools in 2026: Octoparse vs ParseHub vs Diffbot vs Custom
Which web scraping tool is best in 2026? We compare Octoparse, ParseHub, Diffbot, Beautiful Soup and custom engines on cost, scale, anti-bot and JavaScript — with a quick verdict for each use case.
