- A Benchmark Is a Photograph, Not a Measurement
Three runs of the same Wikipedia scrape across two days: httpx swung 5× in latency, primp and nodriver flipped pass rates, browser engines held flat at ~16s. Single-run benchmarks are snapshots — only reruns show the real signal. Data from 7 engines: httpx, curl_cffi, primp, camoufox, patchright, nodriver, cookie_replay.
2026-11-04 - My Playwright Google scraper's pass rate on residential
The honest floor my Google scraper actually ships at. 4/9 pass on Decodo rotating, ~1.95 MB per query, 15-30× more expensive than Serper. Every optimization I tried on top made it worse.
2026-10-06 - I scraped Google SERPs with proxies, at Serper's price
How I'm scraping Google SERPs with Camoufox, minted identity, and Decodo residential proxies. 20/20 pass at ~$0.0007 per SERP, with the full journey from curl to the mechanism that worked.
2026-10-06 - Does humanizing a scraper help on Google SERPs? No.
Interleaved A/B of scroll + dwell + fake mouse moves vs plain baseline on Decodo rotating. Zero pass-rate improvement, 68% more bandwidth, 3-6× latency. Why the mechanism can't work.
2026-10-06 - curl_cffi didn't help me scrape Google SERPs
My full ladder of what worked and what didn't scraping Google: plain curl, curl_cffi × 17 TLS profiles (30/30 blocked), Playwright, and the stealth recipe that finally pulled a real SERP on my home IP.
2026-10-06 - A residential pool burn killed my Google scraper: 4/9 → 0/9
4/9 pass on Monday, 0/9 on the next check: same code, same keywords, same pool. Pool reputation is a shared resource you don't control, and it moves faster than any browser-side fix.
2026-10-05 - Scraping Google SERPs with Camoufox: 20/20 at ~$0.0007
The mechanism that beat everything else: Camoufox + one minted Google session + parked tab + in-page fetch(). 20/20 pass on Decodo rotating, ~$0.0007/SERP steady state. At parity with Serper.
2026-10-05
