What user-agent should I use for Zillow scraping?

When scraping websites like Zillow, it's important to respect the site's robots.txt file and terms of service, as unauthorized scraping can be against the website's policies and can lead to legal issues or getting your IP address banned. Zillow's terms of service explicitly prohibit scraping, and they have measures in place to detect and block scrapers.

However, if you have legitimate reasons to scrape Zillow and you have obtained permission, you should use a user-agent string that accurately represents your bot or service. A user-agent is a string that a browser or application sends to a web server to identify itself. Web servers use this information to deliver content in a format suitable for the user's device.

For ethical web scraping, it is often recommended to use a custom user-agent that includes the name of your bot and a URL or email address where you can be contacted. This approach is transparent and allows the web server administrators to identify the traffic coming from your bot and to reach out if there are any issues.

Here's an example of a polite user-agent string for a hypothetical scraping bot:

MyZillowScraperBot/1.0 (+http://mywebsite.com/contact)

When setting the user-agent in your scraping tool, the exact method will depend on the tool or library you are using. Below are examples of how to set a custom user-agent for web scraping using Python with the requests library and JavaScript with the node-fetch package.

Python Example with requests:

import requests

url = 'https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/'
headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'MyZillowScraperBot/1.0 (+http://mywebsite.com/contact)'
}

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

# Proceed with your scraping logic here...

JavaScript Example with node-fetch:

const fetch = require('node-fetch');

const url = 'https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/';
const headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'MyZillowScraperBot/1.0 (+http://mywebsite.com/contact)'
};

fetch(url, { headers })
    .then(response => response.text())
    .then(body => {
        // Proceed with your scraping logic here...
    });

Remember that even with a polite user-agent and the best intentions, scraping can still be disruptive to the target website. Always ensure you're not violating any terms of service or legal agreements, and consider the ethical implications and potential impacts on the website's resources. If in doubt, always reach out to the website owner to ask for permission or to see if they offer an API or other means to access the data you need legally and without scraping.