Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Decoding SERP API Pricing: What Drives Cost and How to Pay Less
A SERP API bill is keywords times depth times locations times devices times frequency. Why depth got ten times dearer in 2025, and how to pay less.
Matt Brown · October 5, 2026 Public-Record Collection for Investigative Reporting: Method, Ethics and Verification
Public records drive investigations, but only if collected carefully, preserved as served and checked before publication. A method for newsrooms.
James Meadow · October 5, 2026 Writing a Company Data Collection Policy: A Working Template
Most teams that collect web data have no written rules for it. A working policy template: scope, approvals, sources, personal data and takedowns.
Matt Brown · October 4, 2026 Accessibility Auditing Across Markets: Testing What Users in Each Country Actually See
An audit of your US homepage says little about your German or Japanese one. We audited 23 sites from four countries: a quarter had market-only problems.
James Meadow · October 4, 2026 Rate Parity Monitoring: Catching Your Own Inventory Undercut
Hotels lose direct bookings when their own rooms appear cheaper elsewhere. How to monitor rate parity across channels and markets without false alarms.
Matt Brown · October 3, 2026 How to Detect Fake Reviews and Review Fraud at Scale
Fake reviews are banned in the US, UK and EU, and platforms remove hundreds of millions. How to detect review fraud across many products, with tested code.
Matt Brown · October 2, 2026 Using hreflang to Find Every Language and Country Version of a Page
hreflang lists every localized version of a page. We checked how top sites use it, what breaks, and why some versions only open from inside a country.
James Meadow · October 1, 2026 Normalising Prices, Numbers and Dates Across Locales
1.234,56 € and $1,234.56 are both prices, and 03/04/2026 is two different dates. How to parse scraped values correctly by locale, with tested code.
James Meadow · September 30, 2026 Schema Drift in Scraped Data: Catching Broken Extractors Before Your Users Do
Scrapers rarely crash when a site changes. They keep running and return subtly wrong data. How data contracts and batch profiling catch drift early.
Matt Brown · September 29, 2026