What user-agent should I use for scraping Yellow Pages?

When scraping websites like Yellow Pages, it is important to consider the website's terms of service and any legal implications of web scraping. Many websites have specific rules regarding automated access, and disregarding these rules can lead to your IP being blocked or other legal consequences.

If you've determined that you can legally scrape the Yellow Pages website and you wish to set a custom user-agent for your web scraping bot, it's generally a good practice to use a user-agent that represents a real browser. This is because websites may block requests that come from user-agents that are known to belong to bots or are non-standard.

Here is an example of a user-agent string for a common web browser:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.150 Safari/537.36

This user-agent string represents a request from a Chrome browser running on a Windows 10 machine.

Python Example with requests

Here's how you might use this user-agent in a Python script using the requests library:

import requests

url = 'https://www.yellowpages.com/search'
params = {'search_terms': 'restaurant', 'geo_location_terms': 'New York, NY'}
headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.150 Safari/537.36'
}

response = requests.get(url, params=params, headers=headers)

# Check if the request was successful
if response.status_code == 200:
    # Process the response content
    print(response.text)
else:
    print('Failed to retrieve the page')

JavaScript Example with axios

And here's how you might set the user-agent in a JavaScript (Node.js) script using the axios library:

const axios = require('axios');

const url = 'https://www.yellowpages.com/search';
const params = {
  search_terms: 'restaurant',
  geo_location_terms: 'New York, NY'
};
const headers = {
  'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.150 Safari/537.36'
};

axios.get(url, { params, headers })
  .then(response => {
    console.log(response.data);
  })
  .catch(error => {
    console.error('Failed to retrieve the page:', error);
  });

Important Considerations

• Respect Robots.txt: Before scraping any website, you should always check the robots.txt file (e.g., https://www.yellowpages.com/robots.txt) to see if the website owner has disallowed certain paths from being accessed by crawlers.
• Rate Limiting: Make sure to implement rate limiting in your scraping script to avoid sending too many requests in a short period of time, as this can overload the server and result in your IP being blocked.
• Session Management: Some websites might require maintaining a session or cookies to access certain pages or to keep track of the number of requests. You may need to handle cookies and sessions in your code.
• Legal and Ethical Considerations: Always ensure that your scraping activities are legal and ethical. Never scrape private or sensitive information, and always follow the website’s terms of service.

Keep in mind that the user-agent string should be used responsibly and should not be used to misrepresent the nature of the scraping bot. Always use scraping techniques judiciously and with respect to website owners and their resources.