Bright Data Provides an All-in-One Platform for Web Scraping and Dataset Building

TL; DR: Bright Data provides web scraping and data analytics solutions to help companies make data-driven decisions and train their AI models. Its all-in-one secure data platform allows users to extract large amounts of public web data and build valuable datasets to inform their operational and business decisions. We spoke with Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data, about its web scraping solutions, data analytics suite Bright Insights, and the value of data in today’s markets.

The internet is the world’s greatest database. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to write the many research papers I wrote for school, follow and recreate the latest viral cooking recipes, or stay up to date with news from around the world. Its resources are limitless, and its data has become invaluable in today’s landscape.

But what if there was a better way to collect public web data without manually searching yourself? Enter web scraping. Web scraping is an automatic method of extracting website content and its data and replicating it elsewhere. Users can leverage web scrapers to collect large amounts of public web data in a fraction of the time it would take to do it manually.

Web scraping isn’t a new concept. In fact, developers have built their scrapers for decades. But users don’t have to write code to use a web scraper today. Bright Data is a web scraping platform that provides AI-powered web scraping tools to help users facilitate their data collection.

“The need for data became immense in the past decade, and public scraping has become harder to do because websites are trying to prevent web scraping in many cases. So companies like ours experience a lot of success because we can help people through those hurdles,” said Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data.

Bright Data has played a crucial role in the development of AI training models. Its tools are vital for collecting massive amounts of web data to feed and train AI models. Companies can also use its capabilities to create business-ready datasets for intelligence analytics. Whether you’re an eCommerce business owner or an AI developer, Bright Data can help you along your journey.

Founded in 2014, Bright Data helps companies find and collect crucial web data to drive decision-making and innovation. Its efficient web scraping tools have streamlined data collection for thousands of companies worldwide, including Microsoft, McDonald’s, and Statista.

“We oversee such a huge part of the web scraping activity in the world. This year, 20,000 companies connected one exabyte of data through Bright Data. That’s 33,000 times bigger than the dataset used to train ChatGPT,” said Or.

Bright Data allows customers from every industry to retrieve public web data in a flexible and reliable way. Bright Data uses automation to power its web scraper solutions, which helps it gather data at scale and convert it into a structured, organized form for viewing.

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“eCommerce was our number one industry for obvious reasons, such as price comparison and competition. It’s just about knowing what the competitors are doing, trying to optimize based on that knowledge,” said Or.

Bright Data is also a go-to resource for financial services, online marketing, and cybersecurity sectors, to name a few. Its solutions enable users to collect the data they need to make informed business decisions and stay agile in their markets.

Bright Data offers a variety of solutions to help businesses implement web scraping into their processes. Companies can use its Scraping Browser API to scrape with website unblocking automation, its Web Scraper IDE to build their own solution effortlessly, or visit its Dataset Marketplace to access freshly populated and validated datasets.

Leveraging AI has helped Bright Data elevate its web scraping process. It not only boosted the automation capabilities but also increased the quality of the data collected. AI allows users to better understand the content and context of the data they want to scrape.

Bright Data’s use of AI has also helped it enter the data analytics arena. Not too long ago, Bright Data acquired Market Beyond, a leading eCommerce data insights provider. “And we launched our own AI product, Bright Insights. So we ruled the web data collection industry for a while and wanted to give additional value to our customers,” said Or.

Bright Insights takes the company’s web scraping to the next level by providing a data analytics suite to help users get more out of their data. Users receive actionable, AI-driven insights covering any category and product at any time. This way, teams can unlock more value from their data collection and make better data-driven business decisions.

“For specific niches, they need to be on top of everything in real time and be the best. And they will usually buy specific datasets not as broad as GenAI, so they can refresh the data and be the best in that single job,” said Or.

Bright Data empowers teams to gain a competitive advantage with its data solutions. Companies need fresh data to make relevant changes and stay agile in their markets. Combining Bright Data’s web scraping tools and Bright Insights allows them to do so. Bright Data’s State of Public Web Data Report 2024 also goes into detail as to how businesses are accessing public web data, and the value in this process.

As Or said, without data, AI would not exist. AI lives and relies on data to generate its solutions and power its capabilities. Public web data can play a crucial role in its progression. Or told us AI surpassed Bright Data’s primary audience, eCommerce, for web scraping in 2023.

“Our customers need vast amounts of data, but the data must be extremely fresh. It’s all about knowing what happened now, a second ago, not a month ago. And you can only do that if you get a lot of fresh data and if you trust the quality of it,” said Or.

Companies need relevant information to train their AI models or their solutions will be outdated. Bright Data allows teams to collect fresh, high-quality data to improve their AI journey. Bright Data also seeks to improve the web scraping process with its soon-to-be-released tool, Bright Shield.

“It’s something we built for ourselves. Just last year, we realized that we have a huge product here. So we talked to multiple potential customers, and everyone wanted it,” said Or.

Bright Shield’s suite of products takes a new approach. It will allow companies to enforce internal scraping policies and safeguard their operations based on their needs. One of the products is domain specification, which will enable teams to classify websites with automated rules and block requests to flagged websites.

“So users can’t even make that mistake, and that’s just one feature under Bright Shield. The main value of it is to help customers enforce company policy. So, for the first time, we’re selling that to the compliance teams and engineering teams that need data to do whatever they need. So it should help them to do their job,” said Or.