

Low Cost Product Feature Information - gbiss

My partner and I come from an academic background in information extraction and we would like to gauge interest in a potential service that would provide cheap product feature information for products in various web catalogs such as amazon.com and ebay.com.  We imagine that the service would be subscription-based and would provide extracted values such as price, weight, dimensions, physical memory size, etc for a wide range of products. The service would cost less than $100 a month.  Though a lot of sites are offering APIs with some feature information, we have noticed that much of the information is still in "raw" format- not ready to use.
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nostrademons
[http://www.google.com/products?q=ipod&aq=f](http://www.google.com/products?q=ipod&aq=f)

<http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=ipod>

Also, don't underestimate the difficulty of doing this. I know a little bit
about how Google Squared works, and it's basically a complicated mess, and
often doesn't even get the right answer. (A search for [rice cooker] failed
miserably, for example.) Granted, they're solving a harder problem - not just
products, but all facts on the web - but creating a useful database of
products on the web that's comprehensive _and accurate_ enough to pay for is
probably an even bigger problem.

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gbiss
Thanks for the links, it's definitely a hard problem, but as you pointed out,
it's a bit easier when you're focused on products which often have landing
pages (on say amazon or ebay) with lots of highly structured data. I think
google squared is cool but probably not useful to a web retailer because there
is no API (that I can find) and no guarantee of good coverage for a given
catalog.

