Crawling Instagram Comments: Residential Agents Get IG Data

That's how the old data drivers play it.

Recently, several buddies doing cross-border marketing approached me to complain about trying to crawl the Instagram comment section for user feedback, only to have their accounts blocked at every turn. Last week, a friend of mine who works for a trendy brand received a warning email from IG just after crawling 200 comments. There's actually adishonest practices--Use a residential agent as a cover to play a "cat and mouse game" with the platform.

Why does it have to be a residential agent?

There are three types of agents on the market, and I'll tell you something from the bottom of my heart:

IG's wind control system is so smart that the IP segment of the server room has long been marked as a blacklist. Take our own ipipgo's residential agent, behind each IP is a real home broadband, crawling data is like an ordinary user swiping a cell phone, the system can not tell whether it is a real person or a machine.

Hands down, I'll build a fake system.

A Python example is given here, noting three key points:

import requests
from random import randint

 Proxy settings for ipipgo (focus here)
proxy = {
    "http": "http://user:pass@gateway.ipipgo.com:9020",
    "https": "http://user:pass@gateway.ipipgo.com:9020"
}

headers = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 15_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148"
}

 Random request every 5-15 seconds
for comment_id in target_list.
    response = requests.get(
        f "https://www.instagram.com/comments/{comment_id}/",
        proxies=proxy,
        headers=headers
    )
    time.sleep(randint(5,15)) This wait time is important!

Notice in the code theRandom Waiting Timerespond in singingMobile UAThe two of them can be perfectly camouflaged with residential proxies. Previously, a customer did not add a random wait, the results of the use of proxies as usual was blocked, this is the details are not in place.

A guide to avoiding the pit (a summary of lessons learned through blood and tears)

1. Never use a free agent.Last year there was a data monitoring team that used free IPs for cheap, and the data crawled was 80% of spam.
2. The IP pool should be deep enough: It is recommended to go for something like ipipgo, which offersTens of millions of IP poolsservice providers, a single IP can be used for up to 2 hours per day
3. Note the protocol type: IG is now checking socks5 protocol strictly, it is recommended to use HTTP protocol is more stable!

I'm sure you're wondering about that.

Q: How many bars can I climb in a day without being blocked?
A: The actual test with ipipgo's rotation strategy, a single account within 5,000 entries per day is as stable as an old dog. There is a client who does public opinion monitoring, relying on 20 accounts polling, picking 100,000 pieces of data per day

Q: What should I do if I encounter a CAPTCHA?
A: The residential proxy itself can reduce the CAPTCHA trigger rate. If you really encounter it, it is recommended to pause for 30 minutes, change the city IP and try again. ipipgo background can specify the regional IP, this function is very useful!

Q: What can I do if I can't catch all the data?
A: 80% of them are speed-limited, put in the request header a"Accept-Language: en-US"Try it. Last time a customer added this parameter, the collection efficiency is directly doubled!

Let's get real.

Proxy service water is very deep, some businessmen sell the server room proxy as residential. I will teach you aa method of checking authenticityThe ASN number of the IP is checked. The ASN of the residential agent is attributed to the telecom operator, while the data center number is displayed for the server room agent. Like ipipgo's background directly display ASN information, this is more reliable.

Lastly, although the residential agent can reduce the risk, but the collection frequency should be controlled. After all, IG is not vegetarian, don't crash their servers. Conditional recommendations for distributed collection, multiple accounts + multi-region IP combination, which is the long-term solution.