Free downloads WebScraper2/8/2024 However, the pricing structure is a little opaque and it’s not entirely clear to me what is and isn’t included. After the 90 day trial ends or you use your credit, Google has something called the “free tier,” which you can learn about here. With all that out of the way, it’s finally time to create your remote machine.Ī brief sidebar on pricing: While you’re in the free trial, the costs you incur should be deducted from your \$300 credit. Once the API is enabled, you should be taken the VM instances page. You’ll need to click the blue “ENABLE” button. Now, you should automatically be taken the Compute Engine API page. You’ll need to make up a name for your project (like python scraping), but it can be anything-this is basically just a folder. You may be asked to create a project at this point. Click on the three bars in the upper right, and navigate to “Compute Engine” > “VM Instances”. Finally, on step 3, change the account type to “Individual” and enter your credit card information. Per Google, you shouldn’t be charged until either you run out of the \$300 credit or 90 days elapses, whichever comes first.Įnter your country, “personal project” for your organization, and accept the terms of service. On the blue welcome banner, click “TRY FOR FREE.” 2Īs foreshadowed, you’ll need to go through a quick, three-step process and enter your credit card information. To get started, we’re going to activate our free trial, which gives you \$300 to use for 90 days. Click “console” in the upper right to go to the main dashboard. Once you complete the sign up process, you’ll be taken back to the main page. You will need a credit card to complete this process, but if this is your first time signing up for Google Cloud, you’ll get a free \$300 credit to use in your first three months. Go to, click “Get started for free”, and use your Google account (or create a new one) to sign up. To get started, you’ll need to create a Google Cloud account. Getting started with Google Cloud Platform If you need some help with the command line, there is of course stackoverflow or this helpful free book. Prerequisites: I am assuming you know how to use Python for scraping and have a very basic understanding of bash and the command line. I did not know about this resource when I taught the course in 2021, but in the part of the multiverse where I did know about Google Cloud, here is what I shared with my students: 1 If this is your first time creating an account, you also get a \$300 credit for three months. YMMV, but I have scraped for two weeks straight for less than 50 cents. This platform has a ton of tools (most of which I do not understand in the slightest), but for our purposes, Google Cloud Platform allows anyone to create a virtual machine that is always on, always online, scalable, and generally very very cheap. Enter Google Cloud Platform (this post is in no way sponsored, I just like the product). For me, this has generally meant scraping only on days I won’t be traveling back and forth to campus and only during the day (so I can let my computer sleep at night).Īs you can imagine, this workflow is incredibly slow and tedious. You can sidestep some of these problems by uploading your code to a remote cluster, but in my grad student experience, doing so is costly and often infeasible. Collecting a lot of data takes a long time, time in which you need your computer powered on and connected to the internet. You don’t need to limit your research to data from a few specific cases that are feasible to manually collect.īut scraping is not without its attendant hassles. You don’t need a team of research assistants or co-authors to create big data sources. When you know how to scrape, the world opens up. I enjoyed teaching this class, and there are a lot of good lectures, but my favorite is the day we spend on web scraping-a skill that has a democratizing power. In the summer of 2021, I taught our department’s annual short course on Python. Remote Python Web Scraping on a Grad Student Budget
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