Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwelten | Hacker News Reader

Interesting approach. The annual churn stat seems brutal, I imagine that gets worse in certain categories (restaurants, pop-ups, seasonal businesses).

How do you handle conflicting signals? E.g., a business shows as open on Google, closed on Yelp, and the website returns a 404. Is there a confidence score in the API response or is it binary (exists/doesn't)

View on HN

We have models which take all of this into account when producing the verdict. For enterprise clients we emit a calibrated confidence score. With public api we decided to start simpler. Also, we are not using Google data. I’m not a lawyer, but doing that for any maps-related company is simply against Google’s terms of use

FWIW it may be legal to break terms of use

It doesn't fit into our plans of building this

Fair enough. Just remember that in case terms of use bother you in the future. Consult your company's lawyer before doing it.

Completely agree - we have been in constant communication with them

Interesting. Can you elaborate more on that? I was wondering the same thing with other providers, if I can scrape data from their platforms. On what grounds do you think it might be okay?

On the grounds that there's no law that says someone can put some instructions on their website and you have to follow those instructions.

You should consult a lawyer just in case there is such an obscure law, but I don't think there is. Browsing a website doesn't create a contract between you and the website operator, even if the operator says it does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com