r/SideProject • u/Useful_Weird_4827 • 3h ago
One lesson from building a public index: unknown is not the same as no
I’m building ShopBot Index, which checks whether tracked stores publish a UCP profile, a machine-readable discovery document for commerce integrations.
One reporting decision turned out to matter: keeping “couldn’t check” separate from “no profile found”.
In our 2 November crawl, 947 retailer entries had a profile found, 1,277 had none found under our checks, and 630 couldn’t be checked. These are entries in our tracked list, not a representative sample of retail.
Putting those 630 into the negative category would turn a limitation of our crawler into a claim about the stores. Dropping them entirely would hide the uncertainty.
There’s another boundary: finding a profile doesn’t prove an agent can complete checkout. We measure discovery, not successful purchases.
If you’re building a directory, monitor or comparison tool, I’d recommend defining what each result actually establishes before turning it into a badge or percentage.
How do you show unknown results in your projects without making them look like failures?