How do I collect data from many websites every day?

A practical way to collect data from many websites every day is to build a scheduled web scraping pipeline. The basic pattern is:

1. List the sites and data you need

   • Identify pages, fields, and update frequency.
   • Check whether the sites offer an API or RSS feed first.

2. Choose a collection method

   • API: best if available.
   • Scraping: use HTML requests + parsing for static pages.
   • Browser automation: use Playwright or Selenium for sites that render content with JavaScript.

3. Build one scraper per site

   • Each site usually needs its own parser because page structures differ.
   • Keep them modular so one failure doesn’t stop the rest.

4. Store the data centrally

   • Save results in a database like PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite for small jobs.
   • For larger jobs, use cloud storage plus a database.

5. Schedule it daily

   • Use:
     • cron on a server
     • GitHub Actions for simple public jobs
     • Airflow / Prefect / Dagster for more complex workflows
     • Cloud schedulers like AWS EventBridge, GCP Cloud Scheduler, or Azure Scheduler

6. Add reliability

   • Retries with backoff
   • Logging and alerts
   • Deduplication
   • Rate limiting to avoid being blocked
   • Change detection if you only want updates

7. Monitor and maintain

   • Websites change often.
   • Expect to update scrapers when layouts change.
   • Track failures and data quality.

Simple architecture

• Scheduler triggers daily run
• Crawler/Scraper visits each site
• Parser extracts data
• Database stores normalized records
• Dashboard/alerts notify you if something breaks

Recommended stack

If you want a straightforward setup:

• Python
• Requests + BeautifulSoup/lxml for static pages
• Playwright for dynamic pages
• PostgreSQL for storage
• cron or Prefect for scheduling
• Docker for deployment

Important note

Make sure you:

• Respect robots.txt and site terms
• Avoid overloading websites
• Prefer official APIs where possible
• Consider legal and ethical constraints around scraping

If you want, I can help you design a simple daily scraping system for your specific websites, or give you a Python example with scheduling and storage.