AutoCheck A free vehicle history tool for Hungarian used car buyers, built around one question: i...AutoCheck A free vehicle history tool for Hungarian used car buyers, built around one question: i...
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AutoCheck A free vehicle history tool for Hungarian used car buyers, built around one question: is this car worth buying? No account needed to get an answer. Built as an installable PWA, because someone checking a car is standing next to it with a phone in one hand. It runs headless Chrome in a serverless function to read live car listings, then scores them against market data.
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Nugraha's avatar
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@Noel Gregory The installable PWA fits the one-handed, next-to-the-car use case well. How are you handling listing layout changes when headless Chrome reads live data?
Noel's avatar
Honestly: it breaks. Every scraper does, eventually, and anyone claiming otherwise hasn't run one long enough.
What I care about is that it breaks loudly rather than silently. A parser returning nothing is a bug I can see; a parser returning confident garbage is a wrong verdict...
Andreas's avatar
"Breaks loudly" is the right instinct. Two things that pair well with it: cache the market snapshot instead of rescraping per request — the same listing checked 50 times shouldn't cost 50 headless Chrome runs — and dedupe by listing ID, returning the cached verdict with a...
Noel's avatar
Caching by listing ID is obvious in hindsight and I'm slightly annoyed I'm not doing it already. The same popular listing gets checked over and over, and every one of those is currently a fresh Chrome instance.
"Checked X ago" is a better answer than a fresh scrape anyway. For a...
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