Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Accessibility Auditing Across Markets: Testing What Users in Each Country Actually See
An audit of your US homepage says little about your German or Japanese one. We audited 23 sites from four countries: a quarter had market-only problems.
James Meadow · October 4, 2026 Is Your Target Blockable? An Anti-Bot Stack Lookup
Before building a scraper, find out what protects the target. We checked the top 1,000 domains: which anti-bot vendors they use and how a plain client fared.
Chris Collins · October 3, 2026 Rate Parity Monitoring: Catching Your Own Inventory Undercut
Hotels lose direct bookings when their own rooms appear cheaper elsewhere. How to monitor rate parity across channels and markets without false alarms.
Matt Brown · October 3, 2026 Proxy Selection as a Multi-Armed Bandit Problem
Which proxy configuration should the next request use? Treat it as a bandit problem. In our simulation, adaptive selection came within 2% of perfect hindsight.
James Meadow · October 2, 2026 Designing Idempotent Scrapers: Restarting Without Duplicating
Scrapers crash. We killed one ten times mid-crawl: a naive version stored up to 4.3 times the rows, an idempotent one exactly 500. How to build the second.
Chris Collins · October 2, 2026 How to Detect Fake Reviews and Review Fraud at Scale
Fake reviews are banned in the US, UK and EU, and platforms remove hundreds of millions. How to detect review fraud across many products, with tested code.
Matt Brown · October 2, 2026 Using hreflang to Find Every Language and Country Version of a Page
hreflang lists every localized version of a page. We checked how top sites use it, what breaks, and why some versions only open from inside a country.
James Meadow · October 1, 2026 Character Encodings in Scraped Data: Detecting Charsets and Fixing Mojibake
We fetched 193 top homepages in six countries. A common Python default garbled the text of 37 of them. How to decode scraped pages the way browsers do.
Chris Collins · October 1, 2026 Keep the Raw Response: Archiving Scraped Pages in WARC for Replay
Parsers improve and extractors break, but a page you did not keep cannot be parsed again. How to store raw responses in WARC, with tested code and real sizes.
Matt Brown · October 1, 2026