Python Guro Help Needed...

[ConstantColby]

Hi Guys,

 

I am no programmer and I need help trying to figure out how I can create a script that will search through craigslist for posting that has images similar to what I am looking for.

i.e. I wanna buy a specific type of table and have an image of it.

Can I use that image as the input (like how google image search does), and the script will look through craigslist postings and find all the postings that have images similar to what I have given.

 

Not sure how complicated this will be.

But wanted to see if anyone has done something like this before.

 

Thank you!!!

[Electronics Wizardy]

so you want to compare your image to the ones on craigslist?

 

If thats the case, things like google's and others reverse image seraches won't work as you have a custom set of images to compare it against. 

 

You probably want to stay far away from doing the image stuff if you can, as anything with images recognition is a lot of work.

[rapidkillerx]

"finding images similar to what i have given" is an extremely complicated problem for computers. If you really want to go that route, it would require a high level of understanding of machine learning to set up. Also, craigslist doesn't have an API for pulling data, so you'd need to figure that out. Alternatively, you could just reverse image search the table you're looking at and put site:craigslist.org in the search bar, which would probably work better than what you could do anyway.

[Taylor Dettling]

As prevously mesntioned by @rapidkillerx, Craigslist does not have a native API to pull data off their site so you will need to set this up yourself, so some basic web scraping knowledge is needed but nothing too hard, use requests or similar solutions to write your own API of sorts. The image part is a huge pain and I've done stuff like it before but it is very complex and not something a novice programmer should be doing. The best option is to use one of Microsoft or Amazons services that does this for you if you are new and do not have the skills required to build your own image recognizer and similarity checker. If need any other help free to message my on discord (DM me if you want it) but I can't provide my own image processing and recognition code as I use it for closed source applications but I can offer a few pointers if you stumble across issues

[vorticalbox]

Would it not be a better route to search for key words rather than images? 

[Taylor Dettling]

8 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

Would it not be a better route to search for key words rather than images? 

Yeah it would be a lot easier, but you still need the application to be able to look at the origional image and generate some keywords from it to search from right? Or else how does it know what keywords to search for? I could be thinking about it totally wrong though to be fair

[vorticalbox]

6 minutes ago, Taylor Dettling said:

Yeah it would be a lot easier, but you still need the application to be able to look at the origional image and generate some keywords from it to search from right? Or else how does it know what keywords to search for? I could be thinking about it totally wrong though to be fair

Well you have eyes and the image so you can add the key words, unless you want an automated system, then you could use Google image search to get what an image is off then use that to create a key word list. 

 

Other options are pushing you into neural networks which are super fun

[Taylor Dettling]

11 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

Well you have eyes and the image so you can add the key words, unless you want an automated system, then you could use Google image search to get what an image is off then use that to create a key word list. 

 

Other options are pushing you into neural networks which are super fun

Oh thats what you mean, makes sense. I'm not sure if OP wants a automated system, I like the idea of doing nothing though haha, classic programmer in me. 

 

Neural networks are pretty fun haha, Amazon and Microsoft have some that are already built that they could pretty easily use but thats no longer free so....