Show HN: Weekly reports that list all key changes to competitors' web sites

deepdiveduck.com

10 points·bluepeter··5 comments

We're using Google Headless Chrome and Puppeteer on AWS Fargate to make this happen. We had it on Lambda, but we gave up and moved it to ECS/Fargate after too many hiccups.

This could be very helpful to staffing agencies. You can alert them when one of their customers puts a new job on their career site, when a member of staff leaves or just provide them with insight into the client so they have conversations points beyond remembering they have a dog.

I’ll show it to a few of our customers and hopefully they get in touch with you.

All the best with your new venture.

Thank you very much! We agree that it would be helpful for staffing agencies to monitor key staff defections or openings.

This is pretty cool, does it compare pixel to pixel, by the raw HTML or something else?

Thanks!

It actually does 3 different comparisons... namely, we do a pixel-by-pixel comparison, a DOM comparison, and a "content" comparison (i.e., the words that the end-user sees).

We only trigger a new version that we alert the customer about, however, when actual content changes. We provide the pixel-by-pixel screenshot, too (but it's often not very useful unless the changes are very small and image based). (We also don't currently show the DOM comparison as we assume it won't be valuable for most of our target customers.)

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