Developer explains why Google Trends scrapers silently fail and how to fix them

·1 views

A developer investigated why Google Trends scrapers frequently return empty results despite running successfully and charging users. The core issue is that Google's internal Trends endpoint aggressively rate-limits requests from datacenter IPs, issuing silent rejections rather than clear error messages. A secondary bug stemmed from an inconsistent XSSI guard prefix in Google's JSON responses, where a hardcoded comma separator failed against the real endpoint, which uses a bare newline instead. The developer resolved both issues by routing requests through residential proxies with browser warm-up and implementing session rotation with exponential backoff on failures. The fix was packaged as an Apify scraper that only logs output — and only bills — when real data is actually returned.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

Developer Builds Anisha, a Hindi-English Voice AI Tutor, in 10 Days Using Python

A developer named Ashish Kumawat built Anisha, an open-source voice agent designed to support learning and literacy, over a 10-day challenge organized by Murf AI. The system was constructed using Python, LiveKit, and Murf Falcon's text-to-speech API, and supports Hindi and Hinglish to better serve Indian learners. Anisha can remember returning users, conduct learning exercises, make outbound calls, escalate to human agents, and hand off conversations to specialist agents such as a Math Specialist. A key technical challenge involved ensuring that each specialist agent used its own distinct voice rather than defaulting to Anisha's audio pipeline during handoffs. The project is publicly available on GitHub, and the developer plans to expand Anisha with additional specialist agents going forward.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

PawBot Is an AI-Powered Browser Pet That Reacts to Files You Feed It

Developer Varshith V Hegde has built PawBot, a Chrome extension and browser demo that places an animated golden retriever puppy on your screen, inspired by 1990s desktop pets like Neko and Tamagotchi. The pixel puppy roams the screen, chases the cursor, and can be fed files, emoji, or pasted text, triggering a chase-and-eat animation sequence. It uses Google Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite as a personality engine to generate short, mood-aware responses based on what it has eaten and its current emotional state. If left unattended for 40 seconds, the puppy falls asleep with animated Zzz particles, and users can also pet or wave at it via mouse clicks. The project was submitted for the DEV Community Weekend Challenge: Dog Days Edition and is available as an open-source repository on GitHub.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Vendzoo Launches All-in-One Business OS for Bangladesh's SME E-Commerce Market

A developer has built Vendzoo, a SaaS platform designed to consolidate the fragmented tools used by small and medium e-commerce businesses in Bangladesh. The platform combines POS, inventory management, courier integration, fraud detection, and customer analytics into a single dashboard. Vendzoo integrates with four major Bangladeshi courier services — Pathao, Steadfast, RedX, and Carrybee — using a unified internal architecture that makes adding future couriers straightforward. An intelligence layer runs automated features including a fraud risk engine, RFM-based customer segmentation, churn prediction, and profit-and-loss reporting. The platform was built to address the daily operational chaos faced by thousands of merchants who previously relied on spreadsheets, multiple apps, and manual processes to run their businesses.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Docker networking and volumes explained: how containers communicate and persist data

A technical guide published on DEV Community explains how to enable communication between Docker containers using user-defined bridge networks, which provide built-in DNS resolution by container name. By default, containers are network-isolated from each other, meaning services like an API and a database cannot reach one another unless explicitly connected to the same network. The article also covers Docker's four network drivers — bridge, host, none, and overlay — outlining appropriate use cases for each. On the data persistence side, it addresses the ephemeral nature of container storage, where all written data is lost upon container removal, and demonstrates how named volumes solve this by existing independently of any container's lifecycle. The piece is part of an ongoing series aimed at developers building multi-container applications on a single machine.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community