The accelerated growth of the internet and IT have brought us to new and unprecedented heights in 2023. The abundance of data available to businesses today is so large that it is hard to put it into comprehensible terms.
To make matters more absurd, the near-infinite collection of data online only keeps growing. With so much information, even a team of skilled data science professionals are incapable of accessing and putting knowledge to good use without technological assistance.
If we compare similar markets and business environments a few decades ago and now, the internet has been the unstoppable force of change. Most importantly, it evens the playing field by making valuable information accessible to more people across the globe.
As access to valuable data becomes public, hard-working and talented individuals can use it to contribute to revolutionary changes. Business, innovation, and the collective effort of specialists around the world make the XXI century the era of collaboration and change. Open data exchange helps us make decades’ worth of progress, while our predecessors did not have such luxuries due to a lack of resources and access to knowledge.
Today, everyone is a beneficiary of public data access and exchange. Even better, many companies willingly take an extra step forward and create separate Application User Interfaces (API). To make access to their data even more simple. With a more levelled playing field in many markets, greedy and overprotective parties get exposed and fall behind.
In this article, our goal is to highlight and celebrate the value and importance of open data on the web. Here we will discuss the biggest perks of public information, as well as modern business tasks that create better systems for data collection and analysis. In the end, you will find an additional section on internet privacy software, its benefits, and how it finds its way into the toolbox of a modern data scientist. For example, residential proxies protect your identity while automated data collection tools are in use. Instead of exposing your main IP, the remote server takes away all the risks while your tools stay fully operational. Keep reading to learn about proxies and their effect on public data exchange, or check out blog articles from top providers to find out more.
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How open data benefits you
The abundance of public data on the internet has brought significant improvements to the lives of all internet users. Today, the average web surfer can start studying, read books, listen to music, and improve their skills from the comfort of their own home, free of charge.
While in-depth, and interactive courses or tutorials still need payment, anyone can find suitable free alternatives with just a little bit of persistence. With a consistent approach and constantly renewed data sources, you can also learn many things and develop new skills.
However, none of this would be possible without groundbreaking work from Google and computer scientists working on search engines. Today, there are not many tech companies that can hold the candle to Google. By crawling through data on the web, it created a system where the websites and sources of open data get their recognition by ending up on top results for search queries.
Today, Google is the most reliable source of information for billions of internet users across the globe, and visitors have full confidence that the search engine will lead them to the best deals, tutorials, learning material, and other sources of open data.
Funnily enough, the main downside to all interconnected systems is pretty ironic – they are simply too good. With just a few clicks, we can access more information than our ancestors could understand and process in many lifetimes. When everything is so easy to get, internet users get spoiled, and a weird phenomenon occurs: teenagers and young adults in 2023 often know less about important topics and problems than prior generations. By taking open data for granted, many people keep putting up important tasks and achievements because accessibility kills their ambition.
Open data benefits for businesses
Open data is extremely beneficial for companies and driven business-minded individuals, but it brings too much comfort and addictive entertainment into the lives of the average web surfer. By targeting competitors, valuable open data sources, and good APIs, companies can analyze competitor prices and product availability or search for investment opportunities.
Data scraping is the most popular strategy for extracting valuable public information. It accelerates data analysis by automatically transforming downloaded page documents into data sets. The only problem with web scraping is IP blacklisting. While targeted websites are still a source of open data, their owners are usually against web scraping and other types of bot traffic
Access data with residential proxies
Residential proxies are intermediary servers that use an IP address of another device instead of exposing your digital identity. The best providers have robust proxy IP pools, with millions of addresses in over 190+ countries.
Proxy servers are essential for web scraping because you can dedicate a separate but secure IP address for bot traffic instead of attracting all attention to your main IP. Even better, you can scale up your efforts by using many addresses for multiple data scraping tools.
With residential proxies, we can unlock a massive chunk of open data online that otherwise is unavailable due to internet censorship and other location restrictions. With a quick set-up, your web traffic enters the web in a different location, where relevant but geo-restricted data sources suddenly become available.
Summary
Despite the constant rapid growth, the abundance of open data on the internet is already so massive that it already feels infinite. With no hard ceiling for data in available markets and niches, web users will always have inspiration for new improvements, ideas, and innovations.
