still would love to find better ways to find the most likely dates and cities for events in feeds users submit here

often the needed info is obvious to humans but rather hard to extract for a machine .. .. the trouble is that that machine doesn't have those many extra cultural hints of relatedness that humans are able to take into account in an instant without even noticing - theres a lifetime of learned connections in every human :-)

one thing that did quite well was to index lots of old listings data with a fulltext search application and scoring the results of searches. I was trying that with kinosearch (and its sccessor: Lucy) because you could though a lot of terms at it and get nicely weighted/ranked results pretty quickly and was easy to install and get started with and not too heavy to use on my old pc.

sure using searcxh tools that way was a pretty rough and hacky experiment, but for what it was it did better than i expected.

a yacy index could probably work too

played with lots of other methods but at the end of the day to do much good it still usually ended up needed more and more data so with my limited resources pretty much everything ended up turning into some kind of search experiment anyway because things would end up spending too much time waiting for data I guess a server farm or access some kind of shared grid thing would probably be wanted ... but maybe a few gpu's currently just sitting there idle could be used for something?