41–50 of 76 posts
Make it an app not a website. Users can download and install it, enter flight data and click to start monitoring.
The landing page ( https://www.swmonkey.com/ ) still has the workd "Southwest" used several times, and the picture of what is obviously a Southwest plane. I wish common sense prevails and this (obviously very useful) service doesn't die because the founder can't control his ego.
Does putting a human in the loop make scraping okay? Can there be a button on the web page : "please click here to run a price check for one of your fellow travelers" that initiates a web page being fetched, attached to a round-robin queue of fares that are being monitored?
I made an open source version of this. https://github.com/scott113341/southwest-price-drop-bot
Nice work, it even has a deploy to Heroku button! Honestly, I think it's pretty lame trying to profit from arbitrage on SW prices like that. $3 per alert? Really? Great job making an OSS implementation.
I made an open source version of this. https://github.com/scott113341/southwest-price-drop-bot
Nice work, it even has a deploy to Heroku button! Honestly, I think it's pretty lame trying to profit from arbitrage on SW prices like that. $3 per alert? Really? Great job making an OSS implementation.
Lame? Possibly. Profitable? Probably.
Given they're charging for this service, maybe there's a way to make it work economically by having low cost workers (e.g. Mechanical Turk or even a bank of workers in certain countries) perform the checks manually (you could even create a browser extension that automates the form filling, but leaves a human to push the button and parse the results). At least by offering it as a paid service, they have some sums they…
Set it up so the user's browser scrapes it when a button is pressed, and send a reminder every X days as chosen by the user.... User comes to your site, clicks a button, and Southwest's page loads in an iframe, where js does the lifting.
Given they're charging for this service, maybe there's a way to make it work economically by having low cost workers (e.g. Mechanical Turk or even a bank of workers in certain countries) perform the checks manually (you could even create a browser extension that automates the form filling, but leaves a human to push the button and parse the results). At least by offering it as a paid service, they have some sums they…
Set it up so the user's browser scrapes it when a button is pressed, and send a reminder every X days as chosen by the user.... User comes to your site, clicks a button, and Southwest's page loads in an iframe, where js does the lifting.
"The problem I see with their argument is that they are making this information public." I love this idea! However, I think that unfortunately this argument doesn't hold up, and wouldn't in court. The information is available via their site, but that does not make it public.
Could one offer fair information if there's no reference to Southwest? Is having a website full of listings like "flightno: 123, flight_datetime: 2018-03-04-1045, price: 234.56, price_datetime: 2017-11-15-1130" something Southwest could successfully block?
In the blog post, the link to their product page is broken...
If you're not in the US, what could a company do to stop you from scraping?