As many as ten years ago, data were approached in rather traditional ways by most companies. They used in-house sales data, customer analytics, and some regular market surveys. The information was significant but rather historical. Companies reflect on what has already occurred.
Such an attitude is evolving rapidly today. In an online economy where prices change instantly, intense competition, and customers change their behavior within seconds, organizations must understand what is happening across the broader internet. The prices of competitors, market availability, customer sentiment, and upcoming trends are factors that are altering buyers’ choices in real time.
This is causing companies to reconsider their data strategies. More and more organizations are becoming reliant on publicly available web data as an important source of intelligence. There is a growing ecosystem of companies behind this transformation, creating the infrastructure to gather and organize that information. Oxylabs is one of the most notable of them.
The New Data Imperative
The digital marketplace is fast-moving, and there is no time to wait to pass on information. Online prices fluctuate more than once a day, product information is posted and removed within a few minutes, and fares in the travel industry vary with demand and the time of year.
For businesses that want to remain relevant, adopting conventional research approaches is no longer sufficient.
A retail e-commerce company, for example, may face competitors across hundreds of stores on various market platforms. If a competitor drops the price in the middle of the night, a company without real-time market information may lose customers almost instantly.
The same is true of travel platforms. They monitor the prices of airline services and hotel rates across dozens of booking platforms. Financial analysts keep a close eye on news channels and online forums to gauge market sentiment. Cybersecurity teams analyze online communities to identify potential threats.
All these strategies rely on one important competence: access to trustworthy information on the public web.
The Reason why Web Data is not Easy to find
On a human side, it is not hard to navigate through a site. An individual just opens a page and reads what is written on it.
Automated systems that strive to collect vast amounts of data operate in more complex settings. Most sites block repeated access from the same IP address, detect abnormal browsing behavior, or regularly change their structure to make them inaccessible to automated scraping.
Other companies that have tried to establish their own data-collection infrastructure often end up with complex systems that must be continually upgraded as technology advances.
This has necessitated outsourcing web data infrastructure, as it is a complex task.
Proxy Provider to Data Platform
Oxylabs was started in 2015 in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a proxy service provider.
The proxies serve as intermediaries between a user and a site, meaning the user’s requests appear to be sent from other IP addresses or locations. This is used in web data acquisition to distribute requests, and blocking of automated systems does not occur.
Oxylabs has built one of the largest proxy systems in the industry over the last 10 years, with more than 177 million IP addresses across over 230 countries and territories. This international network enables businesses to see public web information as users in other parts of the world do.
The company is currently headed by CEO Vytautas Savickas.
International business, especially, requires visibility, as prices, search results, and product availability are likely to change by location.
The company has since moved beyond proxies to a wider range of tools for data acquisition, as it began to demand web intelligence. They are scraping APIs, automated scrapers, and systems used to fetch structured data from complex websites.
Oxylabs provides pre-assembled infrastructure, so businesses do not have to manage the systems needed to gather data; instead, they can focus on data analysis.
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Data Collection
Artificial intelligence is also working its way into the strategies companies adopt for data. AI systems need large, diverse datasets to train algorithms and generate insights.
Public web data is significant in this process and provides information on products, consumer views, market trends, and internet behavior.
Recognizing this change, Oxylabs released an AI-powered device, OxyCopilot, in 2024. The system assists users in developing web scraping workflows through natural-language prompts rather than complex code.
The trend is indicative of general technological development. Artificial intelligence is slowly making technical processes easier that could not be achieved without special engineering skills.
Ethical Considerations
Due to the increased need to gather web data, the ethical considerations of data collection methods have become more significant.
The companies, however, need to ensure that the mechanisms used to collect information comply with applicable legal frameworks and responsible data use, even when the information is made publicly available.
Oxylabs has prioritized ethical sourcing of proxies and open infrastructure. The company has also funded investigative journalism and research projects by partnering with organizations such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and universities, including Stanford University.
Rethinking Data Strategy
The largest change currently occurring is not merely access to web data, but the way companies consider it.
The companies are no longer solely relying on internal information; they are synthesizing their own information with information they have gathered from the rest of the internet.
Web intelligence is a competitive advantage in this environment. And although end-users will never be exposed to the engines running in the background, firms such as Oxylabs are increasingly significant in creating the infrastructure that enables the realization of current data strategies.
