The Rise of Troy: How Great Leaders Impact Our Deep Web Technologies

Troy Mentzer has worked for big companies and state government, but neither really challenged him enough. Troy wanted something different. He wanted a career where his daily work would directly impact the business.

As our Data Acquisition Department Manager, Troy accomplishes this and so much more. Like a team captain, Troy works closely with our engineer team and oversees projects that find their way to us. He also has the difficult task of determining scope on potential new projects.

When we take on a new project, we examine what its full-scale production work would look like for our team. Troy determines who on our team is the best fit to accomplish the task, what we require to take the project on, and if it’s even possible.

If you were to present our team with a project, Troy would most likely be in contact with you at some point. He works closely with customers, assuring they understand the scope, the specific problems we’re trying to solve, and how we go about it on our side. This encompasses everything from the harvest to the tagging, to the deliverable itself.

Providing Deep Web Search Results

Troy believes that the curiosity to learn different processes is what separates BrightPlanet as a data acquisition firm.

To be innovative as a team, you have to be willing to pursue different ways of thinking about things. So far, we have been able to apply this concept to processes like our collection aspects, tagging, delivery, and scaling. Aside from our processes, Troy is intrigued by the different fields of knowledge we learn working with each of our clients.

For example, by providing Deep Web and Dark Web searches for medical companies, we get a broad scope of what the world of medical devices and online pharmaceuticals looks like. This also applies to the work we’ve done for financial institutions, tech companies, and even law enforcement.

Whatever industry the client calls their own, Troy will take on their challenges through our own specific process. When a client comes to us with a problem, we try to find out as specifically as we can what it is they’re trying to achieve as an outcome. Sometimes, a client might not even know what they’re searching for, let alone the outcome they expect.

In order to provide our clients with the Deep Web search results they need, we start looking at past examples of what they’re trying to get. Troy and the team then decide what sources their needs pertain to, and what keywords may be of interest. After we make these determinations, our team puts a deliverable together to make sense of the problem.

Sizing Up Data Solutions

Troy really appreciates how agile our small size allows us to be when searching for solutions. He notes that larger data companies run into the trouble of getting stuck in old methodologies of how they do their work. Often times, you can’t solve a new problem unless you start thinking in new ways.

This rang true when Troy and our engineers had to undertake the vastness of online pharmaceutical companies for a client. The team had to collaborate and come up with a number of new methodologies that they hadn’t used before.

On top of this, they didn’t know how they would be able to automate around the discovery of new domains and sites that were selling online pharmaceuticals.

Although the task felt like a game of cat-and-mouse, trying to catch fraudulent pharmaceutical sites that would pop up at random and try to avoid detection, our team was always one step ahead. BrightPlanet ended up finding more than the client could ever hope for.

After providing a Deep Web search, we ended up harvesting over 30,000 websites out of a pool of 120,000 websites. This included millions of documents as well as billions of entities we would end up tagging. The client was grateful for the incredible resource we were able to provide.

We made a difference, something Troy had always wanted from his work.

Making a Difference with Open Source Intelligence Tools

The new challenges we face every month are what excites Troy each and every day. Right now, that work includes partnering with Rosoka, a multilingual entity and relationship extraction tool company. This work helps provide sentiment analysis and associations of keywords to deliver a positive result for our clients.

If you are interested in the work we do to provide solutions to our clients, tell us what you’re working on! Troy and our team of expert Data Acquisition Engineers will tell you if we can help find what you’re looking for.