Comment by dfgonzalez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfgonzalez | Hacker News Reader

So cool, a few questions:

1. The prices info, I assume is for US only, right? 2. Are you only analysing new products or also the used ones?

I created a similar (but very, very modest) proof of concept to track mercadolibre's prices (http://numok.com/products/view/samsung-t24a550/9), however it seems to be unusable without a human verifying each listing, as you state in your blog:

> This isn’t the highest price that we’ve recorded for a product though. Turns out this Samsung TV was priced at $1,000,000,000,000.00 ($1 trillion) in early November last year. A dozen sales of this would have gone a long way towards offsetting the American national debt!

3. Are you doing this validation in some way or unreal prices should be expected by using your API?

As stated before, great pricing! Although I'm not sure how does the limit of products work for the two initial account types (Up to 10,000).

Overall, I'm glad to have this API, thank you!

1. Right now, we're focusing on the US. But we've made room for expanding internationally (the "currency" and "geo" fields are in place with this in mind).

2. We're analyzing used and refurbished products as well. Each offer is tagged with a "condition" field that conveys this.

3. The question of whether a price of a product is right or wrong is, we realized with time, subjective. Yes, $1,000,000,000,000.00 is very unlikely, but where does one drawn the line? Hence, we don't mark something as bad data and remove it from the database at the data layer. But we do handle this problem at the search layer - we internally rank products based on factors such as their (estimated) genuineness, popularity and so on. For the user, what this means is that when you query the API, only the most relevant products will be returned. The ranking system is constantly learning, so the vision is that it'll get better with time and data.

Thanks for your words about the pricing. Each API query returns upto 10 products; the free plan provides 1000 API queries a day. So you could retrieve upto 10000 products each day. Hope that clarifies. Glad you find the API useful - I'd love to know more about how you plan to use it!

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