Re:Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
by petercooper on Thursday November 16, 2017 @02:41PM
(#15715835)
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 can run to see if manual would work.
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Re:Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
by lurker12390879 on Thursday November 16, 2017 @03:01PM
(#15716045)
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.
Re:Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
by petercooper on Thursday November 16, 2017 @03:06PM
(#15716100)
That's a neat idea. I imagine a service worker could also be used to do checks in the background, and unless SW wants to ban every IP that hits their site.. :-D
Re:Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
by lurker12390879 on Thursday November 16, 2017 @03:52PM
(#15716504)
Amazon mechanical turk?
Using that you could not only have real people doing this work but also support (for low cost) people in developing nations who need money to survive.
Because of cookie policies they'd need to clear their cookies every time they query.
Re:Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
by lurker12390879 on Thursday November 16, 2017 @03:04PM
(#15716075)
You could also after a time keep stats to determine when the prices are most likely to go down, and then only get the user's attention at those intervals.