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

by jwelten 7mo ago

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)

ymarkov 7mo ago
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
- gzread 7mo ago
  FWIW it may be legal to break terms of use
  - ymarkov 7mo ago
    It doesn't fit into our plans of building this
    - gzread 7mo ago
      Fair enough. Just remember that in case terms of use bother you in the future. Consult your company's lawyer before doing it.
      - ymarkov 7mo ago
        Completely agree - we have been in constant communication with them
  - sbinnee 7mo ago
    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?
    - gzread 7mo ago
      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.