colly VS chromedp

SerpApi focuses on scraping search results. That's why we need extra help to scrape individual sites. We'll use GoColly package.

Interesting. Can you compare it to colly? [0]

Last time I looked it was the most popular choice for scraping in Go and I have some projects using it.

Is it similar? Does it have more/less features or is it more suited for a different use case? (Which one?)

[0] https://github.com/gocolly/colly

Sounds cool, but how is this different from Colly: https://github.com/gocolly/colly?

We could write some snippets mixing all these, but the best option in real life is to use a tool with it all, like Scrapy, pyspider, node-crawler (Node.js), or Colly (Go).

Unless you're specifically trying to do it using net/http, I recommend using colly. I've used it in a few scrappers and I love it!

In this blog, we will be covering the basics of web scraping in Go using the Fiber and Colly frameworks. Colly is an open-source web scraping framework written in Go. It provides a simple and flexible API for performing web scraping tasks, making it a popular choice among Go developers. Colly uses Go's concurrency features to efficiently handle multiple requests and extract data from websites. It offers a wide range of customization options, including the ability to set request headers, handle cookies, follow redirects, and more

github.com/gocolly/colly - popular and widely-used library for web scraping in Go. It provides a higher-level API than net/http and makes it easier to extract information from websites. It also provides features such as concurrency, automatic request retries, and support for cookies and sessions.

There are a billion things that you need to consider when building a decent web crawler, especially interacting with pages in the modern web. For example, a lot of content is dynamically loaded by the browser nowadays, and won't show up if you make a simple HTTP request. Open your browser devtools and look at the network tab after you make a request, and you'll see it makes loads of auxiliary requests. Some content is also only loaded after you interact with it (e.g. hover, click). For that reason I'd recommend using something like chromedp and do browser based crawling, even if it's much slower.

You could use something like the chrome dev tools (https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp) or look into JS runtimes in Go and try to handle the I/O yourself.

Thanks. I've found Chromedp [0] to be a good Selenium replacement when programming in Go. Used in conjunction with HeadlessShell [1] you can deploy a Go app into a container and do the testing all within the same container with low overhead.

[0] https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp

Is it node specific? Could you just use https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp and run it as an actually webpage and get the value from that?

It looks like https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp is the most popular option. There's also https://github.com/playwright-community/playwright-go. Any thoughts or advice about using these tools?

The alternative is to drive, for example, Chrome with the DevTools protocol (using something like https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp or https://github.com/raff/godet (this is my version of a DevTools driver).