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Dev tools · May 17, 2011

FF

Freebie finding site using interesting algorithm

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…

Alternativestop 20% of May 2011

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

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 :)

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