Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.
In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.
Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..
It would be nice to be able to bring to light the price gouging that is taking place in Canada with regards to grocery stores.
The issue with this sort of thing is primarily one of data entry, rather than “tech savvy” as such. Defining the database is easy compared to getting the data in there.
Quick options would include parsing the information out of the stores’ websites (possible, but if Javascript is involved you may be looking at puppeting a browser with Selenium, which isn’t fast and can get tedious, and the approach depends on the websites being complete, accurate, and up-to-date), or hacking or snooping on the stores’ own mobile apps (if they have them) to get price information in a usable format. Approaches like this are inherantly brittle, as even trivial changes made from the grocery chains’ end can cause them to break. Scraping information without a defined API or the cooperation of the owner of the data is a moving target. From experience, I can tell you that it gets annoying fast.
In the case of the Austrian government, they probably wanted that cooperation and defined API. Which would have required careful negotiations with each company and paid programmers looking at the corporate databases. That would have increased their cost and lengthened their projected timeframe. Corruption and corporate greed did the rest.
the responsible minister claimed it’s an immense task and will take til autumn. It will only include 16 product categories (think flour, milk,etc.). And it will only be updated once a week.
I mean that’s pretty pathetic. Better than nothing, but “only updated once a week” sounds like “the intern who has to enter the prices works only for 20 hours”, not like they created an API and told the grocery chains to upload their prices.
Unknown. I don’t use the grocery chains’ websites (I’m of the “go to the nearest physical store and figure it out once there” persuasion), so I don’t know what the complexity level would be. It’s possible that they’re all older-school sites where you can lift the data straight from the HTML, which is relatively fast.
The issue with this sort of thing is primarily one of data entry, rather than “tech savvy” as such. Defining the database is easy compared to getting the data in there.
Quick options would include parsing the information out of the stores’ websites (possible, but if Javascript is involved you may be looking at puppeting a browser with Selenium, which isn’t fast and can get tedious, and the approach depends on the websites being complete, accurate, and up-to-date), or hacking or snooping on the stores’ own mobile apps (if they have them) to get price information in a usable format. Approaches like this are inherantly brittle, as even trivial changes made from the grocery chains’ end can cause them to break. Scraping information without a defined API or the cooperation of the owner of the data is a moving target. From experience, I can tell you that it gets annoying fast.
In the case of the Austrian government, they probably wanted that cooperation and defined API. Which would have required careful negotiations with each company and paid programmers looking at the corporate databases. That would have increased their cost and lengthened their projected timeframe. Corruption and corporate greed did the rest.
They use the search APIs of the grocery store websites.
So essentially it was possible over there due to proper/favourable conditions, whereas here it would be much more difficult?
I mean that’s pretty pathetic. Better than nothing, but “only updated once a week” sounds like “the intern who has to enter the prices works only for 20 hours”, not like they created an API and told the grocery chains to upload their prices.
Unknown. I don’t use the grocery chains’ websites (I’m of the “go to the nearest physical store and figure it out once there” persuasion), so I don’t know what the complexity level would be. It’s possible that they’re all older-school sites where you can lift the data straight from the HTML, which is relatively fast.