AI uses the internet for finding information. There are several reasons why. Usually to get information which is outside of the knowledge cut off date of the LLM (Outside the training Data of the model).
Here is an overview of the available services which are often used by agents and models.
1. Web Scraping Platforms
- Apify: A cloud-based platform for building, deploying, and scaling scrapers, offering pre-built actors for common tasks.
- Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub): Provides automated scraping solutions with anti-blocking technology and proxy management.
- Octoparse/ParseHub: No-code tools for creating scrapers via point-and-click interfaces, suitable for non-technical users.
- ScrapingBee: API-driven service handling headless browsers and proxies to simplify complex scraping tasks.
2. Proxy & Anti-Blocking Services
- Bright Data (Luminati): Offers a global proxy network to prevent IP bans and enable large-scale scraping.
- Smartproxy/Oxylabs: Rotate IPs and mimic human behavior to bypass anti-scraping measures.
3. Pre-Scraped Datasets
- Common Crawl: A massive, free repository of crawled web data (e.g., petabytes of HTML) for training AI models.
- Google Dataset Search: Aggregates public datasets, including web content, for direct use.
4. Browser Automation Tools
- Selenium/Puppeteer: Open-source libraries for automating browsers (often integrated with cloud services like AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions for scalability).
- Playwright: Modern tool for cross-browser automation, useful for JavaScript-heavy sites.
5. AI-Powered Parsing Services
- Diffbot: Uses machine learning to automatically extract structured data (e.g., articles, products) from web pages.
- Import.io: Converts web pages into APIs, leveraging AI to clean and structure data.
6. Cloud Infrastructure
- AWS/GCP/Azure: Serverless platforms (e.g., AWS Lambda) to deploy and scale custom scrapers.
- Docker/Kubernetes: Containerization tools for managing distributed scraping workloads.
7. Legal & Compliance Tools
- Scrapinghub Compliance: Ensures adherence to robots.txt and legal guidelines.
- ProxyRack: Combines proxies with ethical scraping practices.
8. APIs for Structured Data
- SerpAPI: Specializes in scraping search engine results (e.g., Google, Bing).
- ZenRows: All-in-one API handling proxies, CAPTCHAs, and JavaScript rendering.
Key Considerations:
- Ethical Compliance: Services like Bright Data and Zyte emphasize adherence to website terms of service.
- Hybrid Approaches: AI systems often combine pre-scraped datasets (e.g., Common Crawl) with live scraping for real-time data.
- Parsing & Enrichment: Tools like Diffbot use NLP/ML to transform unstructured HTML into usable formats (JSON, CSV).
By integrating these services, AI applications efficiently gather, parse, and structure web data while minimizing technical and legal risks.
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