Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
What Is OSINT? Sources, Techniques & Legal Boundaries
OSINT is intelligence built from publicly available information. What counts as a source, the core techniques, how the work is organised, and where the legal and ethical lines are.
Sofia Marin · October 17, 2026 A Proxy Is Not an Anonymity Tool: What We Cannot Promise You
A proxy changes the IP address a website sees. It does not make you anonymous. What a proxy hides, what it does not, and what a provider can still see.
Sofia Marin · October 17, 2026 Google Image Search APIs: Collecting Visual Search Data at Scale
Image results drive product discovery and expose copied photos. How teams collect Google Images and reverse image data at scale, and what they do with it.
Daniel Okafor · October 17, 2026 API vs Web Scraping: Which Data Collection Method Is Right for Your Project?
Official APIs are stable but limited; web scraping covers the rest. How to choose between them, when to combine them, and the trade-offs that decide it.
James Meadow · October 16, 2026 Building Scalable Data Pipelines With Node.js and Web Scraping APIs
A Node.js pipeline that fetches thousands of pages through a web scraping API: bounded concurrency, retries, resumable output and a tested design.
Chris Collins · October 16, 2026 Free vs. Paid Web Proxies: Which Option Offers More Flexibility?
Free web proxy or paid proxy? Compare limits, locations, sessions and where each one works, and learn the signs that it is time to upgrade.
James Meadow · October 16, 2026 How to Use a Web Scraping API: Beginner-Friendly Walkthrough
From your first request to structured JSON: a step-by-step guide to using a web scraping API, with tested Python, error handling and the settings that matter.
Matt Brown · October 15, 2026 Understanding ASN Diversity in Residential Proxy Networks
A big IP count says little if most addresses sit on a few networks. How to measure ASN diversity in a proxy pool, which metrics to use and what good looks like.
Elena Petrova · October 15, 2026 How Google Shopping APIs Power Modern E-Commerce Intelligence
Google Shopping shows which sellers offer a product, at what price, in each market. How e-commerce teams turn that data into pricing and assortment decisions.
Priya Nair · October 14, 2026