Reviving priceTrackr
So I left work a little early today because they weren’t serving dinner tonight and because I had some stuff to take care of. Most importantly I was contacted by this guy Tom, an EE major at University of Illinois, who would like to donate a server and help improve priceTrackr. So I of course was like hell yes, thus tonight I have been running a few scripts to start collecting some fresh newegg data.
After crawling the user comments pages I have gathered over 35,000 unique newegg product IDs with which we could seed our crawl with, thus essentially eliminating the need for the user submitted add item page. However I don’t think we’ll quite have the resources to update all these items multiple times in a day, but one never knows. Maybe we’ll start small and make a decent amount of ad revenue to warrant switching to a cloud computing server structure. That would be pretty sweet, but of course we must start with baby steps.
Anyway I’ll make updates with priceTrackr’s progress along with everything else. Jeeze 3 posts this week; one might start to think I have nothing better to do 
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Comments
Comment from Cheri @ Blog This Mom!
Time 2008/07/04 at 8:21 AM
Does every guy named Tom have an EE? This sounds good Boe.
Comment from Bryce Boe
Time 2008/07/04 at 9:43 AM
Chuck:
I’m glad you like it. Out of curiosity how did you find the blog if you’re just now hearing about priceTrackr? I don’t hear from many non-close friends from my blog, so I’m always interested to know how they got here.
With respect to your site I think it is very much a possibility, however it would require a decent amount of work to match exact items up with the newegg items and I simply don’t have this kind of immediate time. Additionally bandwidth is the largest issue with respect to crawling. I’ll send you an email, but if you are absolutely interested the best way would be to generate price change lists, both good and bad, so that there is no need for priceTrackr to have to crawl your site.
Cheri:
I suppose they do 
Comment from Chuck
Time 2008/07/04 at 6:12 AM
Hey Bryce,
I checked out pricetrackr for the first time today and I really like it! It’s very differnt from the other price comparison sites. I really like
the graphical chart and the high/low comparison. Great job!
Quick question, I have an online electronics store, it’s small in comparison to say Newegg. But I have at least 10K products online/in stock and I think my prices are very good. Oh ya the question
Can you spider my site to add to the mix of price comparison sites?
Thanks,
Chuck
Happy 4th Of July