Product Overview of Microlink
Microlink is a powerful, scalable, and reliable API solution designed to automate and interact with web browsers in a programmatic manner. Here’s a detailed look at what Microlink does and its key features:
What Microlink Does
Microlink turns websites into structured data, allowing developers and businesses to automate various browser actions. It uses a headless browser, which operates without a visible user interface, to extract data, perform actions, and interact with web pages.
Key Features and Functionality
Automation of Browser Actions
Microlink provides a high-level API to control a headless browser, enabling the automation of any browser action. This includes retrieving meta data from links, taking screenshots, generating PDFs of websites, and identifying technologies used by a target URL.
Structured Data Extraction
When you input a URL, Microlink returns structured data, such as the title, description, language, author, publisher, images, and more. This data can be easily integrated into various applications.
Serverless JavaScript Functions
Microlink Function allows you to run JavaScript serverless functions with headless Chromium programmatic access. This feature enables you to execute JavaScript code remotely in a V8 sandbox, similar to AWS Lambda but without the need to bundle your code. It supports requiring any allowed NPM packages and does not require maintaining servers or handling infrastructure costs.
Performance and Reliability
Microlink boasts high performance and reliability, with a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) commitment of 99.9% uptime. It has a robust infrastructure with 240 CDN edges, serving 8TB of data and handling over 203 million requests per month.
Customizable Plans
Microlink offers both free and paid plans. The free plan is suitable for small projects or low API quota usage, with limitations on burst rate, concurrency rate, and daily rate limits. The pro plan is designed for scale, offering better performance, unlocked functionalities like headers and TTL, and configurable quotas. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel your plan at any time.
Integration and SDK
Microlink provides an SDK that allows you to consume the Microlink API directly from your UI, enabling beautiful link previews for any link. The SDK is lightweight (less than 10KB), fast, and customizable using universal CSS classes. It can detect video, audio, or images automatically and supports embedding content directly into your HTML markup.
Security and Payment
Microlink ensures secure transactions using Stripe as its payment processor. API keys are required for all requests, and you can manage your plan usage and receive notifications when you reach 80% of your usage plan.
Use Cases
- Link Previews: Generate beautiful previews for any link, including videos, audio, and images.
- Data Extraction: Retrieve structured data from websites, such as meta tags, images, and more.
- Automation: Automate browser actions like taking screenshots, generating PDFs, and identifying website technologies.
- Serverless Functions: Run JavaScript serverless functions with headless Chromium access.
In summary, Microlink is a versatile and powerful tool that simplifies web automation and data extraction, making it an invaluable resource for developers and businesses looking to streamline their web interactions.