HasData

Cloud platform for extracting public web data. One API key, three execution modes. All endpoints sit under https://api.hasdata.com and authenticate with x-api-key.

curl -G 'https://api.hasdata.com/scrape/google/serp' \
  --data-urlencode 'q=coffee' \
  -H 'x-api-key: <your-api-key>'

401 invalid key, 403 quota exhausted, 429 concurrency cap, 500 server error (retry).

When to Use

Use this skill when:

• The user needs web scraping.
• The user needs search engine results.
• The user needs structured data extraction.
• The user needs ecommerce, travel, jobs, or local business data.
• The user explicitly asks about HasData.

Three execution modes

Decision rule. Default to a Scraper API when one exists for the platform (pre-parsed JSON, no selector maintenance). Use Web Scraping for arbitrary URLs not covered by an API. Reach for a Scraper Job only when no API equivalent exists — crawler, contacts, sec-edgar, amazon-bestsellers, amazon-product-reviews — or when async fan-out + webhooks save engineering time over a paginated client loop.

Always-true response shape

{ "requestMetadata": { "id": "…", "status": "ok", "url": "…" }, "...": "endpoint-specific" }

Treat data as valid only if requestMetadata.status === "ok". HTTP 200 alone isn't enough.

High-leverage patterns

• SERP-first enrichment. Google SERP can surface public snippets for company and professional-profile lookup. Use it for business or authorized research, avoid unnecessary direct scraping, and treat personal email/phone lookup as allowed only with a legitimate purpose and user authorization.
• AI Mode + verify. /scrape/google/ai-mode for the answer + references → /scrape/web (markdown) on each reference URL → cited RAG context, no vector DB.
• Maps → leads. /scrape/google-maps/search returns business websites and phones; collect contact details only from public, permitted sources and apply opt-out, rate, and privacy-law constraints before any outreach use.
• Crawler → corpus. crawler Scraper Job with outputFormat: ["markdown"] + includePaths: "/docs/.+" produces an LLM-ready corpus in one submission.
• Pre-extracted via SERP rich snippets. knowledgeGraph, localResults, inlineShoppingResults, relatedQuestions carry pre-parsed public facts. Always check them before considering direct page access.

When to call from code (the wiring)

• Auth: x-api-key header on every request. Read from HASDATA_API_KEY env. Never hardcode, never log.
• Timeouts: set client timeout ≥ 300 s. HasData's own deadline is 300 s; shorter clients produce phantom failures while still being billed on completion.
• Retries: 429 and 5xx only — exponential backoff, jitter. Never retry 4xx (auth, validation).
• Concurrency: cap at your plan limit. The free tier is 1; anything higher just generates 429s.
• Async jobs: the submit response handle is body.id (integer), not jobId. Persist it immediately. Poll GET /scrapers/jobs/<id> every 10–30 s with backoff; treat webhooks as best-effort and always pair with polling. On finished the status carries data: {csv, json, xlsx} short-lived URLs — download immediately.

See references/code-recipes.md for ready-to-paste Python and TypeScript clients with retry, backoff, bounded concurrency, and the full job lifecycle.

Common gotchas

• 300 s server deadline. Match client timeout.
• Disable jsRendering first, enable only if the page needs it — most static pages parse fine without a headless browser.
• No cookies parameter — cookies go through headers["Cookie"].
• includePaths regex is case-sensitive. /blog/.+ won't match /Blog/....
• Scraper Job data is double-wrapped. Each row is body.data[i].data; outer wraps with id, jobId, dataId, createdAt, updatedAt.
• requestMetadata.status === "ok" is the only success signal. HTTP 200 alone isn't enough.

…