Day 4 of building ScrapeForge 🛠️

Today was a tedious but necessary day.

I picked up where I left off yesterday and completed the remaining work on the SERP scraper.

After that, I moved on to proxy rotation to reduce detection and captchas. I decided to experiment with free proxies first to understand the trade-offs.

I manually collected around 2000 free proxies and wrote a script to test which ones were actually usable, knowing most would fail. After nearly two hours of testing, I was left with just 139 working proxies.

This made one thing very clear. There is a reason paid proxy providers exist. They save time, effort, and uncertainty.

Today’s lesson: not everything free is worth the cost. Sometimes paid options are simply more efficient.

Follow along for Day 5 🚀