Alright chappers.
I'll be honest, I know very little about coding so I'll be needing some advice on how possible a project I'm looking to finance is.
The basic rundown is that I want to start a little internet company that involves me, and several other people I know as TEFL qualified teachers whoring our services out to non-native english speaking companies and their websites. Offering the cheep bread and butter service of fixing any existing engrish mistakes, while then offering a premium service of completely re-writing parts of their badly written, and ineffectual text blurbs with our masterful creative zen.
Now for the programming part, I would like to know if it was possible to create some kind of automatic system, using a library of common mistakes made by non-native speakers that finds these offending websites (either using a custom search engine or just piggybacking off something like google), finds out their contact details and sends them an email offering our services. Ideally this part needs to be as automatic as possible so it can process the huge volume of potential customers for the occasional one that might actually be interested. I can't think of anything more tedious than manually sending a thousand emails everyday in the hope that someone would actually want to pay me.
If the idea is successful and I find us having more work than we can deal with a few people, I'll need maybe a website and system where I can claw in overly-enthusiastic english post-grads or jobless TEFL teachers and subcontract them excess work for a slice of the lodsemonies.
That is the basic business plan I have in my head. I just need you lovely people to advise me how much money I should be looking at losing to get what I want out of this. Since I'll be hiring programmers hopefully on the cheap from india or china, but my money won't last forever. I've got a starting budget of up to £2000 with the possibility of doubling or tripling that if I don't think it'll be a waste of money.
Whadcha think?
You'll end up emailing every forum in existence.
Well, if you're planning on teaching English to other people, I'd suggest you start by using proper English yourself.
This doesn't sound practical to me. It'd be a lot less effort to just spam the everloving shit out of everyone like most companies do.
Well I'd say this is damn near impossible and extremely impractical.
What you're after is a system to crawl the web, download the webpages, check them against a valid dictionary/library to find spelling/grammar mistakes. Then it's going to have to work out if this is an actual badly written website or just a random comment on a blog, forum, etc.
Then it's going to have to find the contact details of the appropriate contact person and compose an email to look professional and legit (spam filters are hard to get by) and directed to the person you're trying to contact.
At which point it will send it, and you'll get your possible customer.
This is very much impractical. Crawling the web and downloading webpages is going to use up a huge amount of bandwidth which is going to cost a lot.
Secondly, you're going to need a very strong, powerful and failure-safe algorithm to search for mistakes, and then work out if it's a potential customer, or not. Then it's going to need to find and figure out which contact details are the owners. And then compose and send the email tailored to that customer. That is going to cost a lot in processing usage and electricity bills.
The chance of making such an algorithm is very much near impossible and if it were possible it would cost a lot, and that's before bandwidth and power/processing bills, which I can easily guess would cost a lot more than £2,000 a month.
[QUOTE=cdlink14;36022863]Well I'd say this is damn near impossible and extremely impractical.
What you're after is a system to crawl the web, download the webpages, check them against a valid dictionary/library to find spelling/grammar mistakes. Then it's going to have to work out if this is an actual badly written website or just a random comment on a blog, forum, etc.
Then it's going to have to find the contact details of the appropriate contact person and compose an email to look professional and legit (spam filters are hard to get by) and directed to the person you're trying to contact.
At which point it will send it, and you'll get your possible customer.
This is very much impractical. Crawling the web and downloading webpages is going to use up a huge amount of bandwidth which is going to cost a lot.
Secondly, you're going to need a very strong, powerful and failure-safe algorithm to search for mistakes, and then work out if it's a potential customer, or not. Then it's going to need to find and figure out which contact details are the owners. And then compose and send the email tailored to that customer. That is going to cost a lot in processing usage and electricity bills.
The chance of making such an algorithm is very much near impossible and if it were possible it would cost a lot, and that's before bandwidth and power/processing bills, which I can easily guess would cost a lot more than £2,000 a month.[/QUOTE]
Tl;dr: You're fucked.
[QUOTE=cdlink14;36022863]Well I'd say this is damn near impossible and extremely impractical.
What you're after is a system to crawl the web, download the webpages, check them against a valid dictionary/library to find spelling/grammar mistakes. Then it's going to have to work out if this is an actual badly written website or just a random comment on a blog, forum, etc.
Then it's going to have to find the contact details of the appropriate contact person and compose an email to look professional and legit (spam filters are hard to get by) and directed to the person you're trying to contact.
At which point it will send it, and you'll get your possible customer.
This is very much impractical. Crawling the web and downloading webpages is going to use up a huge amount of bandwidth which is going to cost a lot.
Secondly, you're going to need a very strong, powerful and failure-safe algorithm to search for mistakes, and then work out if it's a potential customer, or not. Then it's going to need to find and figure out which contact details are the owners. And then compose and send the email tailored to that customer. That is going to cost a lot in processing usage and electricity bills.
The chance of making such an algorithm is very much near impossible and if it were possible it would cost a lot, and that's before bandwidth and power/processing bills, which I can easily guess would cost a lot more than £2,000 a month.[/QUOTE]
Don't people have flat bandwidth rates?
They've been here in my backwards country for years now.
And electricity bills? Are you kidding me?
Only thing that would affect electricity bills is if you let your computer run for longer and if you let it run long enough to affect the prices then your algorithm is obviously slower than you doing it manually.
But yeah, it's near impossible. You're not going to find anything like that.
[QUOTE=Darwin226;36038605]Don't people have flat bandwidth rates?
They've been here in my backwards country for years now.
[/QUOTE]
I'm assuming the OP is from the UK due to him saying his budget is within GBP. A lot of our ISP's still give us fixed amount of bandwidth with overcharges. Whilst others do traffic shaping. Either they'll shape it too much effectively crippling his service or they'll send him a few nasty letters when they realize his custom isn't turning up what they would call "profit".
[QUOTE=Darwin226;36038605]
And electricity bills? Are you kidding me?
Only thing that would affect electricity bills is if you let your computer run for longer and if you let it run long enough to affect the prices then your algorithm is obviously slower than you doing it manually.
[/QUOTE]
Most systems these days use energy saving techniques, like AMD's cool 'n' quiet, they downclock the processor and GPU to suit the usage load. Considering this crawler is going to be downloading, scanning, comparing. Whilst it may not seem much in the long run, he's going to need his system running effectively 24/7 for his business, and whilst doing its crawling the CPU is most likely going to be running at it's full frequency.
Not too mention that downloading and comparing is going to require HDD usage.
i'll do it for $50 an hour op
[QUOTE=cdlink14;36046643]I'm assuming the OP is from the UK due to him saying his budget is within GBP. A lot of our ISP's still give us fixed amount of bandwidth with overcharges. Whilst others do traffic shaping. Either they'll shape it too much effectively crippling his service or they'll send him a few nasty letters when they realize his custom isn't turning up what they would call "profit".[/QUOTE]
Won't require that much bandwidth, it will just download the markup, not the images/videos/whatever on them.
[QUOTE=cdlink14;36046643]whilst doing its crawling the CPU is most likely going to be running at it's full frequency. [/QUOTE]
Have you ever done I/O programming? The CPU isn't used while waiting for I/O operations to finish.
Scanning is what's going to be CPU intensive.
[QUOTE=cdlink14;36046643]Not too mention that downloading and comparing is going to require HDD usage.[/QUOTE]
Not really.
[QUOTE=swift and shift;36050185]i'll do it for $50 an hour op[/QUOTE]
I'll do it for $45.
[QUOTE=NoDachi;36015651]-snip-[/QUOTE]
If they have websites with broken English its because either they don't care or they don't have money to buy translation services. Which is not a hard to find thing.
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