Show HN: Find and Report Bed Bugs in North America

by caroyannis • 12 years ago

21 30 12 years ago

caroyannis6• 12 years ago

This is a small project I'd started a couple months ago to help myself find and report bed bugs when apartment hunting. All of the other websites that are similar to this are either broken (don't allow you to submit new reports), or are confusing to navigate.

I'm starting with 17 cities in North America.

fourstar• 12 years ago

http://bedbugregistry.com is pretty easy to navigate and it's been around for almost 10 years. In fact, it looks like you're pulling the same data from there as well. Is that legal?

exhilaration• 12 years ago

I came here to say the same thing - I've been checking the above site for years before booking any hotel.

caroyannis6• 12 years ago

For a lot of cities, that website is actually quite broken: you can't submit new addresses or reports.

In Vancouver, BC (where I'm from) you haven't been able to submit new reports for 2+ years unless you're using their iOS app. A majority of the website is outdated and I wanted to make a resource to fix that problem.

huhtenberg• 12 years ago

This is open to abuse and resulting legal backlash from affected properties. What is it that prevents me from submitting a bug report for a W hotel?

caroyannis6• 12 years ago

Hey there! I actually thought about this quite a bit, and I can see how that would be a big issue, especially for property owners.

In the next while I'm going to implement accounts for building managers to be able to flag and remove comments under certain restrictions. I'm hoping this provides people with an easy way to remove fraudulent claims.

m0dE• 12 years ago

The property owners dont have time and dont want anything to do with your site. In fact, they are probably oblivious to your site's existence. How are you going to prevent harming properties' reputation without any involvement from the properties? Because, one way or another, their reputation is at risk through your site.

You should look into how tripadvisor deals with hotels. I believe there's been lawsuits, but the tripadvisor is powerful.

gkop• 12 years ago

As far as I can tell the bed bug claims and identities of the reporters are not independently verified. I have an incentive to false-report on a property I myself hope to subsequently rent or purchase in order to reduce the price I pay. How do you deal with my fraudulent reporting?

caroyannis6• 12 years ago

I'm planning on implementing accounts for building managers/landlords with the power to flag and remove comments under certain restrictions.

I actually have most of the backend for this already complete but I was waiting to see how useful people thought this would be. Apparently very!

MayanAstronaut• 12 years ago

Any name and shame sites do not last due to the overload of fake reviews and opinions. The only way is to verify that they stayed there, like what airbnb does or other hoteling and hosteling site do.

wallawe• 12 years ago

The design is great, did you do all of the design/front-end work on your own?

caroyannis6• 12 years ago

Thanks, I appreciate it! (:

Yup, I did the entire website, front and backend.

coryl• 12 years ago

Cool, I actually thought about doing the same thing after I saw how out of date bedbugregistry.com was.

Hope you have some good SEO implementation as I believe people typing in prospective apartment addresses is probably the biggest lead for traffic.

idlewords6• 12 years ago

It looks like you scraped a bunch of data from my website (bedbugregistry.com) and put a different UI on it. That's pretty lame.

There are lots of worthy projects around bedbug tracking that you could do, particularly if you want to focus on specific cities. But please do the work yourself, and use your own data.

Udo• 12 years ago

Okay, as someone who doesn't know anything about both sites, a casual test (surveying results for Toronto, ON) does not suggest any data was lifted off your site. In fact, there is just one entry for all of Toronto on Bedbug Registry, whereas Bedbug Lookup seems to have dozens.

Of course it's possible that your search simply doesn't work, there are copious error messages on Bedbug Registry... Can you give more details about what you think was scraped from you?

At most BedbugLookup seems to be a superset of your site data.

Edit: seems the search on BBR is not working for me (and apparently for me only). Thanks for providing the links, I see that the data was indeed scraped. Not cool.

idlewords6• 12 years ago

For example, all of the reports on this first page of Toronto results are from my site: http://bedbuglookup.com/toronto-on

Ditto for Vancouver and NYC. I stopped looking after that.

dobbsbob3• 12 years ago

I found my reviews I wrote on the bedbug registry back in 2008 on this site. Definitely scraped

tptacek2• 12 years ago

BBR has 2270 reports in Toronto:

http://bedbugregistry.com/metro/toronto/

It's listed on the site as "the bedbug capital of Canada".

caroyannis6• 12 years ago

Hey there! Sorry about that.

There wasn't any malicious intent, I certainly don't make any money off of this. I just made this project for fun because I thought it'd be useful to have aggregated data from other reporting websites.

I'll remove the data at your request, though.

idlewords6• 12 years ago

I appreciate that, thank you. Part of my problem with aggregation is that it removes the ability for people to amend or rescind what they've posted, or for me to drop listings out of Google when there's a legitimate dispute. The bedbug life is 1% programming and 99% angry/despondent/litigious email.

eps• 12 years ago

Sorry about that.

What?

You basically stole a bunch of data without attribution to forge the credibility of your service and now you are just waving it off as not a big deal? What's wrong with you? I see no other option but to flag you the hell off the front page.

dobbsbob3• 12 years ago

This is needed, because the bedbugregistry seems abandoned and has submission errors where you can't add new entries to some addresses.

One problem is legal backlash, I would have hosted this overseas like the bedbugregistry did to prevent takedown notices and lawsuits.

This is helpful when dealing with lying landlords who claim there was never a problem until you moved in, so it must be something you did and refuse to pay for treatment, refund damage deposits and generally screw you over. Then you go on one of these bug registry sites and discover they've had bedbug infestations for years.

idlewords6• 12 years ago

The Bedbug Registry is hosted here in sunny California. I don't hide from lawsuits.

dobbsbob3• 12 years ago

I thought it was run out of Romania http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/09/urban.pests/

alexcason• 12 years ago

If you only started this in 2014 then how do you have reports dating from 2012 and 2013 (and earlier too?)?

idlewords6• 12 years ago

One weird trick for filling your website with bedbug reports... you won't believe what happened next.

stockninja• 12 years ago

One problem -- Many Airbnb's don't list the actual address until the transaction is processed. Maybe you could include airbnb 'listings' -- but i guess the host could just change the listing ... something to think about.

Show HN: Find and Report Bed Bugs in North America

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