5 Reasons to Use Bright Data for Proxy and Web Scraping Needs

Bright Data is essentially a web data platform that allows its users to collect and analyze publicly available data using web scraping and other methodologies in an ethical and legally compliant way.

Bright Data offers solutions such as custom datasets and a web scraping IDE. The idea behind custom datasets is that you can access the data when you need it. You can consider it as data as a service. 

The quality, performance, and delivery of the data are managed by Bright Data, so you don’t need to worry about it. You also don’t need to worry about the structure of the web page, because Bright Data adapts the code according to the changes in the page structure.

You can develop your own web scraper application using Bright Data’s integrated development environment (IDE).

This was a quick look at what Bright Data is and what it’s used for, but now let’s look at why you should use Bright Data for your web scraping requirements.

Proxy Management

Proxies are an essential requirement for scraping data from the web because they allow you to mask your IP address so that you don’t get blocked by the server from which you are getting the data.

Using Bright Data proxy solutions, you can overcome IP and location restrictions from all around the world and get the best privacy law-compliant proxy management.

The types of proxies offered by Bright Data include:

• Anonymous Proxies: These proxies mask your location as well as IP address to prevent you from getting blocked.
• Rotating Proxies: They constantly modify the masked IP address so that you don’t get blocked for sending too many requests from the same IP address. They can also be used to scrape data from anywhere in the world.
• Shared Proxies: These proxies are helpful when you have multiple admins or multiple people making requests from the same IP address. They come with a 24/7 live support system.
• Dedicated Proxies: They are often called private proxies, which means that they are only assigned to one single user only.

Legal Compliance

Privacy is an important thing to consider when dealing with data on the web. You need to make sure that the data you are gathering has been permitted for public use. This is why many countries have introduced data protection and privacy laws to protect their citizens from data theft.

Bright Data takes care of the privacy of its users. When an application uses Bright Data’s SDK, it asks users for their consent to share their device’s idle resources.

According to Bright Data, “Every new Bright Data Residential/mobile customer is thoroughly vetted and must be approved by a compliance officer to ensure their use case meets our strict standards. Bright Data’s in-depth onboarding process requires clients to share their national ID and sign our compliance statement amongst various other identity verification techniques.” Also, no personal data is collected while opting in to be a part of the Bright Data network.

Datasets & Management

With custom datasets, you can request a dataset to be delivered on-demand, or you can also schedule it. The data that you get can be downloaded in multiple formats, and you can store the data on the cloud using Google Cloud, Amazon, Azure, or other cloud service providers.

One key feature of custom datasets is that you can maintain the dataset based on the ever-changing web page structure.

Integrated Development Environment

What’s fascinating about Bright Data is that it offers an integrated development environment through which you can develop your own web scraper in minutes using pre-existing templates.

After you select a template, you can get the code, and you can test it there. For example, you can give an input of your choice and run the code to get a preview. I have used a YouTube template as an example, but you are free to choose anything from the list.

You can also modify the code according to your requirement.

SERP Data API

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. Using SERP data you can figure out what’s ranking on a search engine based on a search query. Bright Data’s SERP API allows you to transform the SERP data into useful information which you can use to analyse and improve your existing product or service.

The search engines which are supported by the SERP API include:

1. Google Search
2. DuckDuckGo Search
3. Bing Search
4. Yandex Search

You can try the SERP API using a playground provided by Bright Data.

You also get a preview of the data you get for a particular search query, along with the code which needs to be executed.

You can learn more about the API configuration options by clicking the “API Guide” tab besides the “Playground” tab.

Search engines change a lot in a given amount of time so the API adapts to the changes in the structure of the search engine results and transforms the data into useful HTML or JSON output and that’s why you should use a SERP API instead of maintaining your own server. The use cases of SERP API include market research, keyword tracking, price comparison, business intelligence, etc.

Conclusion

Bright Data is a powerful and all-in-one web data platform for all your web data requirements. It’s feature packed, efficient, fast, reliable, and easy to configure and use. You can save yourself a ton of time by using the API and SDK provided by Bright Data instead of maintaining your own server and code.

However, if you aren’t satisfied with Bright Data, you can check some alternatives, such as Oxylabs.