Marcus Chen
Product & Network Architect
Marcus Chen is a Product & Network Architect at Nstdata with deep expertise in proxy infrastructure, network engineering, and web data acquisition. He specializes in designing scalable residential, ISP, mobile, and datacenter proxy solutions that enable reliable access to global web resources. His articles focus on proxy technologies, network optimization, cybersecurity, and large-scale scraping architecture.
All Articles
Best PDF Parsers for AI and RAG Workflows in 2026
A researched, evidence-checked comparison of the best PDF parsers for AI and RAG pipelines in 2026 — LlamaParse, Docling, Marker, Unstructured, Reducto, Firecrawl, PyMuPDF4LLM, and the major hyperscaler document-AI APIs — ranked on OCR, table extraction, and cost, plus an honest look at where Nstdata Crawl fits (and doesn't) in a RAG data pipeline.
Top 10 Open-Source Web Scraping Libraries in 2026 [Don't Miss]
A ranked, evidence-checked comparison of the 10 best open-source web scraping libraries in 2026 -- Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, Firecrawl, Scrapy, Crawl4AI, Crawlee, BeautifulSoup, and lxml -- plus how the managed Nstdata Crawl API fits in, a real API walkthrough, and a language/license/JS-rendering comparison table.
8 Web Scraping APIs Compared: Nstdata Crawl and 7 Rivals
Eight web scraping APIs, ranked and compared on real pricing pulled directly from each vendor's own pricing page: Nstdata Crawl, Firecrawl, Bright Data, Oxylabs, ScraperAPI, Apify, Zyte, and ScrapingBee. See which bundles JS rendering into the base rate, which bills it separately, and which fits your actual scraping job.
How to Create an llms.txt File for Any Website
llms.txt gives AI agents a curated Markdown map of your site instead of raw HTML. This guide covers the exact spec format, llms-full.txt, and a step-by-step process for creating one for any website, plus what Google and Chrome Lighthouse actually say about it.
AI Agents Trend 2026: The Operating Model That Matters
The 2026 AI agents trend is moving toward bounded workflows with trusted context, governed tools, evaluation, and human approval points.
Best OpenClaw Search Providers in 2026: Updated
Compare Brave, Tavily, Firecrawl, Exa, SerpAPI, Perplexity, and SearXNG to pick the right search provider for your OpenClaw AI agent in 2026.
The Best Vector Databases Review: What Is and How to Choose
Compare Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate, Milvus, pgvector, Chroma, and Redis on pricing, scale, and hybrid search to choose the right vector database for RAG.
Web Scraper vs Web Crawler: Main Difference in 2026
Web scrapers extract data from pages; web crawlers discover and index URLs across a site. Compare how each works, when to use them, and how they combine — plus a decision guide for choosing (or combining) both.
Open Lovable Tutorial: Run v3 Locally and Validate the Clone
This tutorial sets up the current Open Lovable v3 repository and separates its host, capture, AI, and sandbox boundaries. It adds build evidence, failure diagnosis, acceptance gates, and an honest Nstdata integration path missing from basic quick starts.
