Stop writing a parser per site. Run five and let confidence decide.

For a long time I ran product extraction off a database of custom selector configs. Hundreds of retailers, each with its own set of CSS selectors mapped field by field: price here, title there, image over there. It worked. It was also a treadmill. Every retailer that redesigned its frontend silently broke its config, and the maintenance tax grew with every retailer I added. Hundreds of configs is hundreds of things that can rot without telling you, usually right before someone downstream asks why a brand's prices went null. At some point I stopped feeding it. The scraping platform I ran at my last engagement fed a 20M+ product catalogue at millions of pages a day, and the thing that made that survivable wasn't better per-site config. It was leaning on almost no per-site config at all. The pattern Instead of one careful parser per site, run several cheap generic extractors on every page, in parallel: JSON-LD. A huge share of e-commerce pages ship a schema.org/Product block because Google rewards it. It has name, price, currency, availability, images. It's the closest thing to a public API hiding in the HTML. OpenGraph tags. og:title , og:image , product:price:amount . Lower quality than JSON-LD, but present on sites too lazy for structured data, because everyone wants pretty link previews. Microdata / RDFa. Older sites, still surprisingly common outside the US. Embedded state. __NEXT_DATA__ , window.__INITIAL_STATE__ and friends. A JSON blob the site's own frontend hydrates from. Heuristics. A price-shaped string near a currency symbol inside the main content region. The largest above-the-fold image. The h1 . Dumb, and dumb works more often than you'd think. None of these is reliable alone. OG price tags go stale, JSON-LD sometimes describes the wrong variant, heuristics grab the crossed-out "was" price. The trick is you don't pick an extractor. You pick per field, and you let agreement between sources carry the decision. Confidence merge Each extractor emits candida