Getting Started

Getting Started

Shifter is the ultimate data toolkit for data collection, we support innovative companies, startups, and entrepreneurs with groundbreaking technology that enables them to collect, structure, and use data flawlessly.

Let’s dig into our product suite and see how each product fits into your data collection process ⬇️

Proxies

A proxy server acts as a gateway between you and the internet. It’s an intermediary server separating end users from the websites they browse. Proxy servers provide varying levels of functionality, security, and privacy depending on your use case, needs, or company policy.

A quick intro to residential proxies

A residential proxy is an intermediary that uses an IP address provided by an Internet Service Provider (ISP), unlike data center proxies that are assigned to a fixed location with the internet provider classified as a data center and can be easily detected.

Residential proxies are assigned by default a physical address and belong to real devices (mobile, desktop, tablet) enabling you to mimic real user behavior when scraping data, thus achieving the highest success rates.

Rotating Residential Proxies

A rotating residential proxy is a type of proxy server that assigns a new residential IP address every IP rotation time, it can be on every connection attempt or at a predetermined rotation time, for example, every 5 minutes.

Rotating residential proxies is ideal for running large-scale scraping operations by concurrently distributing your requests through millions of IP addresses for the best results.

Our rotating residential proxies can be configured from the client dashboard or via API, you can read the full documentation here.

Static Residential Proxies

Static residential proxies are by nature data center IPs but with a catch, they are assigned to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) - making them share the same profile and details as residential proxies.

In essence, they are a hybrid, offering the anonymity and specifications of residential proxies together with the speed and stability of data center proxies.

Also, one important factor to take into account is the fact that static residential proxies maintain the same IP address 24/7 and can be accessed at any time (without IP rotation).

Our static residential proxies can be configured from the client dashboard or via API, you can read the full documentation here.

Scraping APIs

Web Scraping API

Web Scraping API is a REST API that uses the Shifter residential proxy infrastructure together with advanced anti-bot detection measures to extract HTML from any web page.

Shifter's Web Scraping API handles by default proxy rotation, geotargeting, headless browsers, JavaScript rendering, and automatic CAPTCHA solving to provide a seamless flow to extract HTML data.

Our API comes with multiple features to accommodate the most complex use cases, we highly recommend reading our full documentation here.

SERP API

Shifter's SERP API is a best-in-class REST API for extracting real-time data from search engines in structured formats including JSON, HTML, and CSV.

The API handles by default proxy rotation, geotargeting, headless browsers, JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHA solving, and automatic retries.

Our SERP API is capable of handling millions of requests per minute due to the distributed architecture hosted on the Shifter Cloud and also can extract data rendered using multiple devices:

  • desktop

  • tablet

  • mobile

SERP API Google

Extract formatted search engine results pages from all Google services including:

  • Google Search

  • Google Maps

  • Google Jobs

  • Google Trends

  • Google Autocomplete

  • Google Related Questions

  • Google Scholar

  • Google Play Store

  • Google Product

  • Google Recipes

  • Google Reverse Image

  • Google Events

  • Google Local Services

  • Google News

  • Google Sports

Our API comes with multiple features to accommodate the most complex use cases, we highly recommend reading our full documentation:

For the most accurate results with geolocation, we have created the SERP Locations API, an API that you can call to get the full list of locations you use in your queries.

Extract formatted search engine results pages from the Bing search engine.

Extract formatted search engine results pages from the Yandex search engine.

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