Federal Data: A Guide to Downloading U.S. Government Open Data Sets

How do I get federal data? Let's figure out what a proxy IP is.

Recently a lot of friends asked me for US government public datasets, what census, climate records, transportation data and so on. But in practice, many people are stuck in the first step - the site can not open or download speed limit. This time we have to move out of our "network mover" - proxy IP.

To give a real example, last year a friend doing social science research wanted to down the CDC epidemic data, for three days in a row stuck in the validation page. Later, he changedDynamic residential IP for ipipgo, it's just like hanging on, the packets are dropping. Here's the blackboard to knock on:Fixed IPs are easy to recognize, rotating IPs is the way to goThe

The three big pits of choosing proxy IP, 90% people have planted

There are all sorts of proxy services on the market, but you have to be careful with the next government data. Let's start with three common minefields:

As an aside, I compared seven or eight service providers and ended up locking upipipgoThe reason is very simple - their IP pool is large enough to download 20GB of satellite images from data.gov at a speed of 8MB/s, which is more than three times faster than some of the so-called "enterprise-class" ones.

Hands on federal data gripping with ipipgo

How does it work? Let's do it in four steps:

1. Select "U.S. Residential IP" package in ipipgo back office
2. Stuff the API key into the download script (use their off-the-shelf client if you can't program)
3. Set up automatic IP change every 10 minutes
4. Open a multithreaded thread, it is recommended not to exceed 5 concurrency

Focus on the third step, many people feel that frequent IP change trouble. In fact, with ipipgo's intelligent rotation mode, the system will be automatically adjusted according to the site's response, much more stable than manual operation. Last week, I was helping a university lab with NASA's climate data, and the download went on for 48 hours without a break.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What should I do if I get disconnected in the middle of the download?
A: Select the tool that supports the continuous transmission of disconnections, ipipgo client comes with this feature, pro-test disconnect and reconnect as long as 3 seconds!

Q: How do I break the CAPTCHA when I encounter it?
A: Don't just do it! Immediately switch IP, ipipgo's API supports automatic retry for failure, 10 times faster than manually inputting captcha!

Q: What if I want to place multiple datasets at the same time?
A: Use IP pools to divert different tasks to different exit IPs. ipipgo supports up to 500 concurrent sessions, which is enough to cope with small and medium-sized projects.

Why do old birds love ipipgo?

Finally, to be honest, don't look at the advertisements, look at the results. ipipgo has three killer features:True Residential IP(The kind that checks WHOIS),Dedicated bandwidth(It won't steal the internet speed from your neighbors),Intelligent Routing(automatically select the optimal line). Especially their new data collection special package, directly into the commonly used government websites preset templates, white can also be a key to start messing.

At the end of the day, getting down to federal data is an endurance job. Once you've chosen the right tools, all that's left is to make a cup of coffee and wait for the data to be deposited. Next time you get stuck in the download process, remember to try this trick - use a good proxy IP, you can really lose a lot of hair.