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Ask HN: AI-based search to help find any item in local stores?

5 points by dmitrypakhomkin ↗ HN
Hey HN! We're just two guys in a garage and we just launched a new local product search called Goodzer.

http://goodzer.com

Our smart crawler scrapes the internets and extracts inventory data from stores' websites and then finds where those stores are located. Right now we're testing our service in New York City - we found more than 15M products in about 15,000 stores there. So, before scaling to whole US we want to know your opinion on this.

2 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 18.2 ms ] thread
byoung2
I like it...this is an idea I had in 1999, but the technology just wasn't ready yet. I think the big challenge will be getting data from smaller stores who often have a good price but don't serve up their inventory online. For example, while looking for an iPod charger recently, my fiancee pointed out that TJ Maxx (discount women's clothing store) had them for $5. I would have missed this if I just searched online. It may be that you'll have to broker deals with these merchants to get data feeds, or rely on crowd sourcing to get the data, but this is where the real value could be. One other idea I had back in 1999 was the ability to supply a list of products (e.g. Christmas list) and get back a list of places that have all the items with options for lowest total price, shortest total distance, or fewest number of stops.