Hey y’all,
Big update this week:
You can now edit listings directly on NA Beer Finder! 🎉
Every venue now has an “Edit” button. Add or remove non-alcoholic beer, wine, spirits and mocktails directly within the results. No account needed. Available to all users, free and premium.
If it’s a beer, you’ll also have the option to label it as “on tap” too. This data will be used in an upcoming feature.
If you would like to know more about the process of building the community editor, and why it took so long, please keep reading after this beautiful infographic I made.
The Nerdy Stuff:
So why did this take forever?
Well, 90% of NA Beer Finder’s listings don’t live in a database. Why? Because databases go stale fast. I built this to be as real-time and accurate as possible, and that means pulling info via web scraping.
Every time you search, dozens of requests fire off (hundreds if you’re premium), then get cleaned up, and returned, on the fly.
How do you let users edit something that technically doesn’t exist until they search?
That’s what makes community-edited listings... tricky.
It gets worse when venues show up like this:
Total Wine – Downtown
Total Wine & Liquors Store #555, 123 Main St
Total Wine at Main & 5th
Are those the same place? Who knows.
Normally, you’d ping the Google Maps API to sort that out. But with the NA Beer Finder’s volume?
That’d cost me ~$10,000/month.
Hard pass 😂
So I built my own matching engine. It compares stuff like:
📍 Latitude & longitude
📞 Phone numbers
🔗 Social media links
🧠 Other hidden identifiers
Once confident they’re the same venue, it merges them into one.
Now the community editor feeds into that same engine. It treats your edits like scraped content but gives them higher priority, overriding actual scraped data when drinks are missing or don’t match.
Pretty cool, huh?
Want to support this kind of nerdery?
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