Recently I was working on a market research project and frankly, I was getting exhausted spending 80% of my time just maintaining web scrapers. Dealing with rotating residential proxies, CAPTCHAs, and sites constantly changing their DOM structure (looking at you, Amazon and TikTok) is a massive headache when you just want to get to the actual data analysis.<\/p>\n
While looking for alternatives to building scrapers from scratch, I stumbled across a platform called Thordata (thordata.com\/products\/datasets). I spent some time digging into their docs and catalog, and it seems pretty interesting from an engineering\/analytics standpoint.<\/p>\n
While looking for alternatives to building scrapers from scratch, I stumbled across a platform called Thordata (thordata.com\/products\/datasets). I spent some time digging into their docs and catalog, and it seems pretty interesting from an engineering\/analytics standpoint.<\/p>\n
Basically, they handle the extraction and structuring from heavy anti-bot sites and serve it up ready to use. A few things that stood out to me:<\/p>\n
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- Coverage:<\/strong> They have a pretty heavy focus on e-commerce (Amazon, Walmart, Shopee) and social media (TikTok, X, Instagram). They also have B2B stuff like LinkedIn and Crunchbase.<\/li>\n
- Delivery formats:<\/strong> This is what caught my eye. You can either get static datasets (good for training models or backtesting), or use their APIs to pull live data if you’re building a dashboard or tracking real-time prices\/trends.<\/li>\n
- Cleanliness:<\/strong> The data fields (like product specs, reviews, social metrics) are already parsed into clean JSON\/CSV, so it skips the whole regex\/parsing step.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
For me, the main appeal is just outsourcing the infrastructure pain. Not having to manage headless browsers or pay a premium for proxy networks just to get reliable e-commerce data is a huge time saver.<\/p>\n
Has anyone here actually used them in a production environment? I\u2019m curious to know:<\/p>\n
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- How is the API latency if you are using it for live feeds?<\/li>\n
- How quickly do they update their schemas when these big platforms push major UI\/backend updates?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Would love to hear your thoughts, or if you guys have other go-to alternatives for these specific sites (aside from just building it yourself). Cheers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
submitted by \/u\/Mammoth-Dress-7368 <\/a>
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- Delivery formats:<\/strong> This is what caught my eye. You can either get static datasets (good for training models or backtesting), or use their APIs to pull live data if you’re building a dashboard or tracking real-time prices\/trends.<\/li>\n
