Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 9-11. The underlying data for the eBay installation
Here's their ingenious approach: They started with the text of
Death
of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller. They used a mechanical turk mecha‐
nism (we discussed what this means in
Chapter 7
) to locate objects in
the text that you can buy on eBay.
When an object is found it moves it to a special bin, e.g., “chair” or
“flute” or “table.” When it has a few collected buyable objects, it then
takes the objects and sees where they are all for sale on the day's worth
of transactions, and looks at details on outliers and such. After exam‐
ining the sales, the code will find a zip code in some quiet place like
Montana.
