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chadrem / market_bot

Google Play Android App store scraper
MIT License
361 stars 130 forks source link

random data #6

Closed banister closed 11 years ago

banister commented 11 years ago

Hey,

sorry to bug you again :) Just wondering if you can tell me the best way to get random apps using your API. Say i wanted information on 300 random apps in the android market, what's the best way to go about that?

Thanks

chadrem commented 11 years ago

No problem... it really depends on how exactly you define "random" for the problem you are trying to solve. My API doesn't provide a way to find a random app since I'm not aware of Google exposing such a feature.

One options is to build a complete list of all the apps in the store and randomly select from them. Commercial solutions exist for obtaining these kind of app lists.

A less than random option would be to try sampling from random pages of the different ranking lists.

The biggest problem you will probably run into is getting IP banned from Google. They don't like it when you try scraping too much data from their servers and will ban you if you do too much of it.

Hope this helps. Good luck.