I can understand their nervousness; the entire value of Craigslist is
in them being the authoritative source for all things cheap, weird,
bartered, and/or resold within a region, and offering up their
database for anyone else, no matter how noble their cause, is probably
a slippery slope they start down.
There's also the question of whether it resembles a kind of
CL-supported surveillence -- while I fully support all kinds of nasty
things being done to bike thieves, other people feel the same way
about other types of behavior, and once they open their database to
you, it would be more difficult to argue in good faith that no one
else (incl. law enforcement) should be given the same access.
Yeah you have some good points, actually after reading this I'm
feeling a little better. I must say I was impressed with how nice Jim
(president and ceo of CL) was, he must field 100's of these such
requests a day and he was still pretty nice to me.
Regardless, you might check out the eBay RSS feeds -- you can get a
fairly up-to-date feed of any eBay search query, which might be an
interesting (and potentially much larger) source of data.
Thanks for the tip, I have hooked in ebay but didn't fully implement
it, since it's a legit way to do things I think I'll start moving that
way.
P.S.: Are you still having trouble scaling the matcher? I've been
playing around with some other algorithms (specifically, vector space
search), but if you've got things settled down pretty much where you'd
like them, I'll probably put that work on hold and move to other
projects.
No the matcher is running nicely now, I took some time and reworked things.
Thanks-
MJ
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