Open Source Algorithms

We’ve made it our mission to pull in event tickets from every corner of the internet, showing you them all on the same screen so you can compare them and get to your game/concert/show as quickly as possible. Of course, a big problem with most corners of the internet is labeling. One of our most consistently frustrating issues is trying to figure out whether two ticket listings are for the same real-life event (that is, without enlisting the help of our army of interns). To pick an example completely at random, Cirque du Soleil has a show running in New York called “Zarkana”. When we scour the web to find tickets for sale, mostly those tickets are identified by a title, date, time, and venue. We’ve built up a library of “fuzzy” string matching routines to help us along. And good news! We’re open sourcing it. The library is called “Fuzzywuzzy”, the code is pure python, and it depends only on the (excellent) difflib python library.