A user agent is a computer application that works as a client in a network protocol; the name is generally applied to refer to those applications that access the World Wide Web. User agents that connect to the Web can range from web browsers to search engine web crawlers to mobile phones; screen readers, and Braille browsers used by people with disabilities. Continue reading Try This API To Improve User Agent Database, we will tell you about User Agent Generator API; a tool that will make it easier for you to increase your database.
When a user accesses a web page, the application typically sends a text string that identifies the user agent to the server. This text is part of the request over HTTP, prefixed with User-agent: or User-Agent: and generally includes information such as the name of the application, the version, the operating system, and the language. Bots, like web crawlers, sometimes also include a URL or email address so that the website administrator can contact the website operator.
The user agent ID is one of the exclusion criteria used by the robot exclusion standard to prevent access to certain sections of a website.
Types of user agents
Agents can be installed on the computer or used directly from the web, and you can find different types of agents that specialize in different tasks:
Search agents
A search agent is a program that, imitating the behavior of a person and acting autonomously, automatically traverses the internet taking advantage of the link structure of the web. So, a search agent can retrieve a particular document, or use some search algorithm that allows retrieving different documents from the web that are referenced in a source or origin document; or according to previously predefined criteria by its users.
A search agent can perform the following functions:
- Perform queries much faster and on a much larger set of sources than is possible for a human user.
- Consult the contents of different websites at the same time.
- Report updates that occur on websites that are of interest.
- Speed up downloads from the internet.
- Junk or spam removal
- Search for news according to preferences.
The user provides a query to an agent only once, and the agent automatically sends it to different sources or search engines. These agents can be general, or specialized in searching for music, people, images, etc. They are generally spiders that navigate through various web pages, and index the hyperlinks that they find and follow. For example, Google Search, Bing or DuckDuckGo.
Web agents
A web agent is a program that is capable of displaying a resource on the web, typically a web page. Web agents are usually web browsers, which request one or more resources typically via HTTP or HTTPS, such as HTML documents, CSS style sheets, and scripts. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera are some examples of web agents.
Shopping bots
Shopping robots allow us to compare the prices of different e-commerce sites, keeping us well informed before buying, or continuously up to date with the prices established by our competition.
Entertainment robots
They help their users to carry out different tasks, such as reading mail, etc. With these agents we can access a large number of servers at the same time; being especially useful for searching for information that is not indexed by search engines; such as databases, etc.
Mappers
They analyze different websites and extract data on their structure and content, allowing evaluations or comparisons between them.
User Agent Generator API
So, User Agent Generator API is an extensive database of (325.000+ user agent strings) user-agent strings which are quickly accessible with a simple endpoint. We offer to filter the random results with many parameters such as operating system, device type, and browser. Generate random User Agents with this API for your projects. Be able to scrape or access any website as the User Agent of your choice.
This API will receive the selected device and operating systems of your choice and it will deliver a randomly generated User Agent. After signing up, every developer gets a personal API access key, a unique combination of letters and digits provided to access to the API endpoint. To authenticate with the User Agent Generator API REST API, simply include your bearer token in the Authorization header.
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