The Data Collector

Digital transformation has accelerated, bringing e-commerce sales to an all-time high. With more customers going online, and more of our retail giant customers and their service providers switching to virtual stores, the competition is tougher than ever. In their adaptation to a real-time economy, e-commerce brands are taking a different approach: The collection of public web data has become their main source for gaining market insights. However, according to a study by Gartner, organizations spend between 40% to 80% of their significant productive time finding, accessing, integrating, and sharing the information, which leaves very little time for the crucial task of analyzing the actual data received.

Bright Data, the world’s leading web data platform, developed the Data Collector – making web data collection simple. The Data Collector is an automated collection solution, which integrates and automates all stages of the data collection process for customers but leaves them in full control over the data they collect. We believe public data should be accessible to everyone, but unfortunately that is not the case. The world’s biggest source of information, the internet, is not transparent, and the data is not available to everyone all the time. So, whether it is for pricing intelligence, SEO monitoring, market inventory, product reviews and discovery, or anything else publicly available on the internet, by using the Data Collector, customers can gather real-time information with the click of a button.

Like all of Bright Data’s products, the Data Collector is not project-based but value-based. Our automated products were born out of the necessity to find a solution to a real customer problem. The Data Collector, specifically, was created to solve ongoing operational issues. For example, for businesses, building a system from which to collect data effectively usually takes months and requires ongoing management and maintenance. The Data Collector solves this issue and allows them to collect the most reliable data at scale in a matter of minutes.

The Data Collector is a user-friendly product, requiring no more than filling in a form. Our customers only need to define their data requirement at the very start and set up what they need, and we adjust our solutions accordingly so there is minimal set-up time involved.

Another crucial issue for companies, especially from the retail and e-commerce industries, is getting blocked when trying to access the public data they seek. Most of the industry lacks two essential "layers" in the data collection pyramid: 1. their own data collection infrastructure, and 2. software tools that unblock their public target sites and the public data they are seeking, as well as cookie and fingerprint management. The Data Collector integrates our one-of-a-kind SaaS Web Unlocker, which automates IP management and upgrades requests to appear exactly like a typical browser. With that feature, the Data Collector solves the blockage issue (up to 100% success rate). It also enables our clients to retrieve the most accurate public web data, quickly and efficiently. The internet is the largest public database ever created, but unfortunately, due to competition-driven reasons, it is not a transparent one.

We provide our customers with 24/7 support, access to developers, and sanity checks every three hours, preventing errors and breakdowns.

The Data Collector reduces costs associated with time, often by over 75%, and resources of our clients, increasing efficiency by allowing customers to collect the most reliable data at scale, quickly, easily, and without getting blocked. There's also no need for infrastructure or the complex operational effort involved in creating an internal system for data collection.

We like to think of it as the "Upworks" of data. It is a quick and efficient holistic solution, which executes an entire web data collection process in a simple, rapid, and reliable way.

Our interface provides multiple options for selecting the source of information, data points, and frequency of the collection delivery. This reduces a long onboarding procedure to a just a few clicks. No prior programming knowledge or coding is required.

For those interested, the Data Collector is also ideal for more sophisticated data gathering, as it features our own IDE code editor that allows you to write your own more complex crawl code, and the system extracts the data without any manual intervention or onboarding required. Our IDE is developed in JS, which is more accessible, easy to use, and efficient.

Our product also allows for a very easy scale-up, and with every flexibility needed. It has over 15,000 crawlers, and these can be easily increased at any time according to customer requirements.

Sanity checks are performed every three hours with the product. This increases accuracy of the web data collected, as the automated system can identify fake information and adapt quickly to changes. For example, when Facebook changed its format in mid-2021, it was recognized by the automated system, which adapted accordingly, including the creation of two versions for the collection – the old Facebook look and the new look, depending on the country it was generated for. This allowed for "smooth sailing" with no interruption in the collection process.

Testimonials from two of Bright Data’s Data Collector customers:

Dave Walsh – Mathison Mathison offers the first-of-its-kind innovative all-in-one system to manage diversity recruiting, strategy measurement, and reporting. In order to collect publicly available online profile data, Mathison uses Bright Data's Data Collector. This has enabled them to access and collect massive amounts of the specific public online profile data it needs; such data is critical in building its diverse platform and talent network.

“Bright Data has been an extremely valuable partner in helping us meet our growing demands for online data, as we’re able to outsource our data collection and management efforts. Without their technology, we’d be forced to build and maintain datasets manually every time we partner with a new organization, which would take time and resources away from our team’s ultimate goal of matching underrepresented talent with their dream jobs.” Evyatar Korlanski – Israeli Labor Ministry
“At the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we needed access to large amounts of data quickly in order to determine the feasibility of our project to tackle the increasing numbers of unemployment – we have now seen that we can indeed provide actionable job-market insights to the public. Without Bright Data's Data Collector, it would have taken us weeks to gather the amounts of data necessary. Now, we’re able to collect and customize whatever data we need in a matter of minutes.”

https://brightdata.com/