

Show HN: Freebie finding site using interesting algorithm - tectonic

A little while ago I built an automated website that finds free stuff while filtering out scams.  It works in an interesting way.  Most freebie sites on the web contain a mix of real, useful free stuff and scammy affiliate and pyramid schemes.  I realized that affiliate links are always unique (because they need to contain an affiliate code) while real freebies have URLs that co-occur across multiple sites at roughly the same time.  I wrote a crawler in Perl and MySQL that looks for repeating, off-domain URLs that temporally cluster on multiple free stuff sites.  I was surprised and pleased to find that this trick eliminates affiliate links with almost 100% success and tends to find real freebies.  I then let users rate freebies and provide category and description information.<p>Here's the result: http://absurdlycool.com<p>Do you folks have suggestions about how I could make the site more useful?  I recently worked on a redesign, but I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer :)
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ideadude
Never new how this actually worked. Thanks for sharing. I hope others have
some good suggestions.

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todd3834
linkable: <http://absurdlycool.com>

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suking
99designs.com fast

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tectonic
Does it work pretty well?

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suking
yes

