Data Center Proxies

What do you like best about the product?

There are countless great things about Bright Data. Namely, the proxies are simple to use and integrate seamlessly into Python code. In addition, Bright Data provides extensive documentation for setting up and using each of their proxy offerings. The BrightAI chat is incredibly helpful with answering technical questions.

What do you dislike about the product?

Everything is seamless and easy to use, leaving nothing to dislike.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our research team has developed a tool that mimics end users to automate queries of ISP interfaces and extract advertised broadband availability, speed tiers, and pricing data at street-address granularity. To avoid originating all queries from a single non-residential IP address, we leverage a pool of IPs provided by Bright Initiative—the non-profit branch of Bright Data that supports academic and nonprofit projects with free access to data scraping tools. However, the initial version of this tool lacked robustness and extensibility: it frequently broke when ISPs updated their websites and required significant manual effort to integrate new ISPs.

To address these limitations, we built an ML-based data collection platform that queries ISP web interfaces using residential street addresses and extracts data on service availability, quality, and pricing. Bright Data’s pro-bono credits have been instrumental in this effort, enabling us to incorporate new ISPs into the framework and test the system at scale by running large volumes of address queries. BQT+ has already been applied in several policy evaluation studies, including an independent assessment of broadband availability, quality, and affordability in areas targeted by the $42.45 billion BEAD program.

Bright Data’s proxy infrastructure—especially its Web Unlocker—has been critical to scaling up data collection. Without it, we could not reliably run queries at scale on ISP websites protected by CAPTCHAs, many of which present captcha challenges that the Web Unlocker helps circumvent.

What do you like best about the product?

They give you a bunch of solutions, countries and all kind of proxies you can choose from and configure your solution accordingly. Also, they have a good service that will help yo configure investigate and solve issues that you ran into

What do you dislike about the product?

although they did gave me a good service eventually, it took them almost a day to answer my question and go live on zoom with me. Not sure whose fault that was, but my production was influenced by the proxy issue i had and waiting a day to get a response was not that nice (once they wrote me back - we immediately took care of it with professionally and kindly)

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Im using scraping data as part of my solution, and im using bright data proxy service

What do you like best about the product?

I truly appreciate the user-friendly interface and platform. It's incredibly easy to work with, and the team consistently introduces new features and innovations to meet evolving needs and enhance the user experience.

The customer service is excellent. The account managers are not only helpful and polite but are also committed to quickly and effectively solving any issues that arise. The datasets themselves are rich and fascinating, offering a great deal of value.

What do you dislike about the product?

My main frustrations are with the platform's session management. The timeout period for a session is quite short, which can be inconvenient. Additionally, logging into the platform using a code doesn't always work smoothly or reliably.

Like with any web-based platform, occasional bugs appear in datasets and their exports, as well as in the purchasing process. However, these issues are usually resolved by simply updating the browser session.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Bright Data provides rich and relevant data that is essential for my daily work, where I verify data I collect on individuals and companies for research, focuses on ecosystem development, and I use the data to study trends and changes.

What do you like best about the product?

I used one of their prepared datasets through their academic collaboration program (Bright Initiative).
It was easy to find the dataset in their catalog, understand its format, figure out how to query for the right cut of the data that I needed, and finally to download it.
Overall, it's an excellent way to obtain publicly available data, without having to worry about crawling, formatting, etc.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing really major, but it's important to realize that it's better to download a larger dataset than several smaller ones, as the pricing isn't entirely linear.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use data for my research, and it is difficult to collect these data by myself.

What do you like best about the product?

It works well and it is easy to start using it

What do you dislike about the product?

Some features were too complicated to understand if they were present or not.
The company's staff was very helpful, so maybe it was my fault

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We were able to parse some important news outlets that were otherwise not accessible