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I've been using this since the private beta to enrich my eCommerce crawlers with product identifiers not found on the content of an eCommerce product page, but
by tegansnyder 11y ago
I've been using this since the private beta to enrich my eCommerce crawlers with product identifiers not found on the content of an eCommerce product page, but found in the product image itself. Imagine a part number or UPC displayed on a product box, but nowhere in the HTML content of the product page. Using the Google CV OCR feature I can extract meaningful product data from an image to compliment my existing crawl data. It works great.
- duaneb 11y agoWhat's the hit rate for extracting meaningful information? Any false positives?
- tegansnyder 11y agoSince I compare the extracted OCR data against known part, catalog, upcs, skus, the variability is boolean. For instance if I OCR a picture of a tape roll and it has a part number printed on the seam I compare that to a trusted data source of part numbers.
- Laaw 11y agoOut of curiosity, why are there so many people crawling sites for prices like what you're talking about? All of the freelance sites are... well, crawling with jobs involving web scrapers. What's the business here that I'm missing?
- matt_wulfeck 11y agoIf you can manage to slide -- even just a tiny bit -- between consumers and Ecom sites you can make a lot of money from referrals! This is what slickeals and camelcamelcamel do, though only one of those uses scrapers.
- bduerst 11y agoEconomically speaking, it's taking advantage of imperfect markets, where even in this age of internet search information still doesn't flow perfectly from seller to buyer. Throw in affiliate and referral incentives, and you've created an information market.
- tegansnyder 11y agoI'm not crawling for price. Knowing where our products are being sold online is important to understand the landscape for a large manufacture. Understanding opportunities to develop sales relationships we may or may not have directly, and knowing category expansion opportunity is also important.
- nailer 11y agoAffiliate marketing, price arbitrage, integrating with things that don't have APIs or have very poor APIS.
- sandGorgon 11y agoI have been struggling with getting the new "service keys" working with this API. This is the first place that Google is mandating its new security infrastructure. Do you have any sample code that works ?