A little while ago I built an automated website that finds free stuff while filtering out scams. It works in an interesting way. Most freebie sites on the web contain a mix of real, useful free stuff and scammy affiliate and pyramid schemes. I realized that affiliate links are always unique (because they need to contain an affiliate code) while real freebies have URLs that co-occur across multiple sites at roughly the same time. I wrote a crawler in Perl and MySQL that looks for repeating, off-domain URLs that temporally cluster on multiple free stuff sites. I was surprised and pleased to find that this trick eliminates affiliate links with almost 100% success and tends to find real freebies. I then let users rate freebies and provide category and description information.
Here's the result: http://absurdlycool.com
Do you folks have suggestions about how I could make the site more useful? I recently worked on a redesign, but I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer :)
Here's the result: http://absurdlycool.com
Do you folks have suggestions about how I could make the site more useful? I recently worked on a redesign, but I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer :)