

Show HN: Find and Report Bed Bugs in North America - caroyannis
http://bedbuglookup.com

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idlewords
It looks like you scraped a bunch of data from my website (bedbugregistry.com)
and put a different UI on it. That's pretty lame.

There are lots of worthy projects around bedbug tracking that you could do,
particularly if you want to focus on specific cities. But please do the work
yourself, and use your own data.

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Udo
Okay, as someone who doesn't know anything about both sites, a casual test
(surveying results for Toronto, ON) does not suggest any data was lifted off
your site. In fact, there is just one entry for all of Toronto on Bedbug
Registry, whereas Bedbug Lookup seems to have dozens.

Of course it's possible that your search simply doesn't work, there _are_
copious error messages on Bedbug Registry... Can you give more details about
what you think was scraped from you?

At most BedbugLookup seems to be a superset of your site data.

Edit: seems the search on BBR is not working for me (and apparently _for me
only_ ). Thanks for providing the links, I see that the data was indeed
scraped. Not cool.

~~~
idlewords
For example, all of the reports on this first page of Toronto results are from
my site: [http://bedbuglookup.com/toronto-on](http://bedbuglookup.com/toronto-
on)

Ditto for Vancouver and NYC. I stopped looking after that.

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dobbsbob
This is needed, because the bedbugregistry seems abandoned and has submission
errors where you can't add new entries to some addresses.

One problem is legal backlash, I would have hosted this overseas like the
bedbugregistry did to prevent takedown notices and lawsuits.

This is helpful when dealing with lying landlords who claim there was never a
problem until you moved in, so it must be something you did and refuse to pay
for treatment, refund damage deposits and generally screw you over. Then you
go on one of these bug registry sites and discover they've had bedbug
infestations for years.

~~~
idlewords
The Bedbug Registry is hosted here in sunny California. I don't hide from
lawsuits.

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dobbsbob
I thought it was run out of Romania
[http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/09/urban.pests/](http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/09/urban.pests/)

~~~
idlewords
I was living in Romania when that article came out, but the site is hosted in
the US.

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gkop
As far as I can tell the bed bug claims and identities of the reporters are
not independently verified. I have an incentive to false-report on a property
I myself hope to subsequently rent or purchase in order to reduce the price I
pay. How do you deal with my fraudulent reporting?

~~~
caroyannis
I'm planning on implementing accounts for building managers/landlords with the
power to flag and remove comments under certain restrictions.

I actually have most of the backend for this already complete but I was
waiting to see how useful people thought this would be. Apparently very!

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caroyannis
This is a small project I'd started a couple months ago to help myself find
and report bed bugs when apartment hunting. All of the other websites that are
similar to this are either broken (don't allow you to submit new reports), or
are confusing to navigate.

I'm starting with 17 cities in North America.

~~~
fourstar
[http://bedbugregistry.com](http://bedbugregistry.com) is pretty easy to
navigate and it's been around for almost 10 years. In fact, it looks like
you're pulling the same data from there as well. Is that legal?

~~~
caroyannis
For a lot of cities, that website is actually quite broken: you can't submit
new addresses or reports.

In Vancouver, BC (where I'm from) you haven't been able to submit new reports
for 2+ years unless you're using their iOS app. A majority of the website is
outdated and I wanted to make a resource to fix that problem.

~~~
tptacek
I'm not sure that makes it OK to scrape and re-host their data.

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huhtenberg
This is open to abuse and resulting legal backlash from affected properties.
What is it that prevents me from submitting a bug report for a W hotel?

~~~
caroyannis
Hey there! I actually thought about this quite a bit, and I can see how that
would be a big issue, especially for property owners.

In the next while I'm going to implement accounts for building managers to be
able to flag and remove comments under certain restrictions. I'm hoping this
provides people with an easy way to remove fraudulent claims.

~~~
m0dE
The property owners dont have time and dont want anything to do with your
site. In fact, they are probably oblivious to your site's existence. How are
you going to prevent harming properties' reputation without any involvement
from the properties? Because, one way or another, their reputation is at risk
through your site.

You should look into how tripadvisor deals with hotels. I believe there's been
lawsuits, but the tripadvisor is powerful.

~~~
brandonhsiao
By the time the site gets big enough to make a dent in the properties'
reputations, that will also be around the time property owners start hearing
about it.

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alexcason
If you only started this in 2014 then how do you have reports dating from 2012
and 2013 (and earlier too?)?

~~~
idlewords
One weird trick for filling your website with bedbug reports... you won't
believe what happened next.

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coryl
Cool, I actually thought about doing the same thing after I saw how out of
date bedbugregistry.com was.

Hope you have some good SEO implementation as I believe people typing in
prospective apartment addresses is probably the biggest lead for traffic.

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stockninja
One problem -- Many Airbnb's don't list the actual address until the
transaction is processed. Maybe you could include airbnb 'listings' \-- but i
guess the host could just change the listing ... something to think about.

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MayanAstronaut
Any name and shame sites do not last due to the overload of fake reviews and
opinions. The only way is to verify that they stayed there, like what airbnb
does or other hoteling and hosteling site do.

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wallawe
The design is great, did you do all of the design/front-end work on your own?

~~~
caroyannis
Thanks, I appreciate it! (:

Yup, I did the entire website, front and backend.

