Day 4 of building ScrapeForge 🛠️

Today was more grind than excitement.

I completed the remaining work on the SERP scraper and then moved on to implementing proxy rotation.

I decided to test free proxies first. I manually collected around 2000 of them and wrote a script to check which ones actually worked. After nearly two hours of testing, only 139 were usable.

This made the trade-off very obvious. Free proxies cost time and reliability. Paid proxies exist for a reason.

Lesson from today: sometimes paying is cheaper than wasting hours.

On to Day 5.