75 terms

Glossary

The vocabulary this site uses, defined in one sentence each. The one-sentence rule is the point: a definition that needs the paragraph around it to make sense is no use to a reader skimming, and no use to a model quoting it.

A

Actor: A packaged, runnable program on the Apify platform that takes a JSON input, does work on the web, and writes structured results to a dataset.
Ambiente: The unit Argentine property listings count rooms in, including the living room — so a three-ambiente apartment has two bedrooms.
Anonymous surface: The version of a page a site serves to a visitor with no account, no cookie and no token, which is the only surface a credential-free scraper can read.
Anti-bot wall: A block served as a well-formed page with an HTTP 200 status and no results, which makes it indistinguishable from a genuinely empty result set to any status-code check.
Applicant tracking system (ATS): The software a company runs its hiring pipeline in, such as Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby or Workable, usually identifiable from where a job posting sends an applicant.

B

Budget type: A field recording the shape of a posted budget — a range, a maximum with no minimum, a minimum with no maximum, a fixed figure, or none at all.

C

Cache age: How long ago a row's data was actually read from the target site, as distinct from when your run produced the row.
Catalog page: A Mercado Libre product page shared by several sellers, as opposed to an individual seller's publication.
CCPA: The California Consumer Privacy Act, which grants California residents rights over their personal information and whose treatment of publicly available data is narrower than the phrase suggests.
ccTLD: A country-code top-level domain such as .io, .ai, .co or .de, operated under an arrangement with a national authority rather than under ICANN's generic TLD contracts.
Census pass: A cheap first sweep that classifies an area cell by cell without extracting any records, so the cost of the real extraction is known before it starts.
Concurrency: How many requests a scraper has in flight at once — the single setting that most often decides whether a run finishes or spends its time in penalty cooldowns.
Coverage report: A record written alongside the data stating what a run could not reach: what the source declared, what was delivered, and whether a ceiling was hit.
CZDS: ICANN's Centralized Zone Data Service, the single request point through which a researcher asks each generic top-level domain's registry operator for access to its zone file.

D

Dataset: Append-only tabular storage on the Apify platform where an Actor writes its results, exportable as JSON, CSV or Excel.
Day boundary: The moment at which a source decides one calendar day ends and the next begins, which determines which records are returned for a given date.
Delegation: The registry record that says a domain exists and names the servers authoritative for answering queries about it.
Derived field: A column computed by the scraper from what the source published, rather than read from a field the source provides.
DGT environmental badge: Spain's official vehicle emissions classification, issued by the Dirección General de Tráfico as the codes `0`, `ECO`, `C` and `B`, which govern access to urban low-emission zones.
DNSSEC: A set of DNS extensions that let a resolver verify a record cryptographically, signalled in the registry zone by a delegation-signer record.
Dual price: A listing that shows the same item in two currencies at once, as Venezuelan Mercado Libre product pages do with US dollars and bolívares.
Dueño directo: Argentine property-listing term for a private owner selling or renting without an agency, which Zonaprop labels separately from agencies.

E

Edit distance: The number of single-character insertions, deletions or substitutions needed to turn one string into another, used to measure how close a domain is to a brand.
Encoded absence: A missing value represented as a valid-looking one — a rating of 0.00 meaning "no ratings yet", or midnight UTC meaning "no time was given".
Error dataset: A separate dataset holding the rows that failed, with the reason for each, so a partial run is auditable rather than silently incomplete.
Exact-match filter: A check applied after retrieval that discards results the source matched by stem or by approximation rather than by the term the caller asked for.
Explicit null: A field that is present in every row but carries `null` when it has no value, instead of being omitted from the row entirely.

F

Facet expansion: A discovery strategy that reaches a large inventory by combining filters — make, then region, then price band — instead of paginating deep into one unfiltered list.
Fill rate: The share of rows in which a given field actually contains a value, measured over a real sample rather than asserted.

G

GDPR Article 14: The provision of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 that obliges you to inform people when you obtain their personal data from a source other than themselves, as a rule within one month.
Geographic tiling: Splitting a map area into smaller rectangles and querying each one separately, so that a per-query result cap stops limiting how much of the area you can see.
gTLD: A generic top-level domain such as .com, .org, .app or .shop, operated under contract with ICANN rather than by a national authority.

H

Headless browser: A real browser engine driven programmatically with no visible window, used when a site only assembles its data after JavaScript runs.

I

Input schema: A JSON Schema document that declares every option an Actor accepts, with its type, default and description, and from which the platform generates the run form.

J

Jibun address: Korea's older lot-based addressing system, still in wide use alongside the newer road-name system, and published by Naver next to it.

K

Km 0: A nearly-new car registered by the dealer rather than by a customer, sold as used despite having almost no mileage.

L

llms.txt: A plain-text file at a site's root that describes the site, its scope and its canonical URLs for the benefit of language models rather than search crawlers.

N

NAICS code: The North American Industry Classification System code, which classifies the industry of the business that would perform the work.
Nextdoor city slug: Nextdoor's identifier for a city, formatted `city-name--state`: lowercase, single hyphens inside the name, a double hyphen, then the two-letter state code.

O

Output view: A declared projection of a dataset that selects and renames fields, letting one set of rows be presented as several different tables.

P

Pagination depth: How many pages deep into a result list a crawler goes before it stops, often capped both by the site's robots.txt and by the point at which the site stops returning results.
Parked domain: A registered domain pointed at a parking or domain-sale service rather than at a site its owner runs, detectable from the nameserver it delegates to.
Partial phone: The five-digit fragment of a phone number that a listing site renders publicly — an area code plus three digits — which is not enough to call anybody.
Passive DNS: A dataset assembled from DNS queries that sensors observed, holding what resolved to what over time.
Pay-per-event pricing: A pricing model in which the user is charged for each result an Actor delivers rather than for the compute time the run consumed.
Per-row currency: Storing the currency alongside each price rather than assigning one currency to a whole marketplace or country.
Personal data: Any information relating to an identifiable living person, including combinations that identify somebody only when taken together.
Place ID: Google's stable identifier for a location, shared between Google Maps and the Places API, which lets two datasets about the same business be joined without matching on name and address.
Price rank indicator: Coches.net's own placement of a listing against its own estimate of what that model is worth on the Spanish market.
PSC code: The Product Service Code, which classifies the product or service being purchased rather than the industry supplying it.

R

Rate limiting: A server-side control that rejects requests once a client exceeds a threshold, usually with HTTP 429 and a cooldown before normal service resumes.
Redemption period: The 30-day window, documented by ICANN, during which a deleted domain is held before it moves to pending-delete and is eventually released.
Relay number: A phone number a platform allocates in front of a business's real line, so calls route through the platform rather than directly.
Residential proxy: A proxy that routes requests through IP addresses assigned to home internet connections, so traffic originates from the country and network type a site expects of its visitors.
Response due precision: A field saying whether a deadline is a real instant, a date with no time, or a wall-clock time with no zone — so a consumer knows whether it can be converted.
Result cap: A hard limit on how many results one query can return, applied to the query itself rather than to a page, so no amount of paginating reaches past it.
Reverse nameserver lookup: The query that starts from a nameserver hostname and returns every domain delegated to it.
robots.txt: A plain-text file at a site's root in which the site declares, in machine-readable form, which URL patterns automated clients may and may not request.

S

Saturation threshold: The result count at which a tile is assumed to be hiding more behind a result cap and is therefore split into smaller tiles.
Search padding: Results a search adds from outside the area or category you asked for, in order to fill the page, with nothing in the response marking them as such.
Server-side filter: A filter applied by the source before it responds, so that records excluded by it are never transferred and never paid for.
Server-side rendering: A site architecture in which the server sends fully populated HTML, so the data is present in the first response and no browser is needed to see it.
Service request: A post in which a neighbor asks for a provider rather than reviewing one — "anyone know a good plumber?" — which sits in the same Nextdoor feed as genuine recommendations.
Session cookie: A credential a site issues to a logged-in browser, which a scraper can borrow to reach private content — and which expires, taking the scraper with it.
Set-aside: A restriction reserving a U.S. federal contract for a category of small business, such as 8(a), women-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned or HUBZone.
Signed-out surface: Everything a site serves to a visitor with no account and no session — the only part of a site a scraper can read without borrowing somebody's credentials.
Site ID: Mercado Libre's identifier for one of its national marketplaces, such as MLA for Argentina, MLM for Mexico or MLV for Venezuela.
Stemming: Reducing words to a common root before matching them, so that a search for one form of a word also returns its morphological relatives.
Structured data: Machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD following schema.org, that states explicitly what a page is about instead of leaving a crawler to infer it.

T

Trade area: The catchment a business actually serves, which crosses municipal boundaries — and which is what a distance-ordered directory returns when you ask it for a city.
Typosquatting: Registering a domain that imitates a brand through a misspelling, a lookalike character or an added word, usually to intercept traffic or impersonate the brand.

U

UEI: The Unique Entity Identifier assigned to an organisation registered to do business with the U.S. federal government.
Upstream cache age: How long ago a response was cached by a CDN in front of the target site, which is added to a scraper's own cache age to give the real age of a row.

Z

Zone exit: The event of a domain disappearing from a registry's zone file, meaning the registry has stopped publishing its delegation.
Zone file: The authoritative list a registry publishes of every domain delegated in its top-level domain, together with the nameservers each one points at.