priceright.info: A Price Comparison Tool
This project filters the massive corpus of a classified advertisements website into a human-readable summary of prices across various markets over time. The goal of the project is to produce a user-friendly application that provides a price comparison interface when a user conducts a search for a particular item (iPhones were chosen as the item for the project). The website can be used to answer questions such as:
What is the fair market value of the item?
What is the price trend for a given city?
What is the average price across the country?
Course
Fair value is defined as the rational estimate of the market price for a good. But how does one obtain fair value? In particular, how does a user know an advertisement on Craigslist is fairly valued? People commonly, and often unknowingly, attempt to determine the fair value of a good by comparing prices across different markets and against historical prices. While Craigslist is wonderful for its low cost and ease of use, it is both difficult as well as time-consuming to use Craigslist as a price comparison tool. This project attempts to filter the massive corpus of Craigslist data into a human-readable summary of prices across various markets over time.