Auction APIs

[Adrian H]

Hey all, I think it might be fun to try some natural language processing/machine learning on ancient coin auction results. I don't have good web scraping skills, so does anyone know of an auction house where I can query large amounts of past listings and results from? I know you can do this sort of with AC search, but since this is just a little side project, I'd like to not spend anything on it and I don't know how well-suited the AC search search is for the kinds of requests I envision.

[Virgil H]

I know CNG has a database of their sold coins that goes back a long while. I think other auction houses, as well as many dealer's maintain sold databases. I know Forum deletes prices from sold coins, but most don't. I don't know how many keep data at all, but many do. Literally the only thing I don't like about Forum is deleting the prices of sold coins. I understand the rationale, I just don't agree with it. But, I accept it.

Virgil

[Adrian H]

Hmmm.... this is *really* close to what I'm looking for. I'll have to read up more on web scraping techniques but I think this is feasible for getting most of the information I want for each item.

[Virgil H]

Also, the free version of Coinarchives returns a certain number of results with prices realized, how far back depends on the coin. Could be useful for playing around with. Sound like an interesting project.

Virgil

[Altamura]

The SIXBID Coin Collector's Archive has hammer prices for most (but not all) auctions they had: https://www.sixbid-coin-archive.com/#/en

Regards

Altamura

[Adrian H]

I know CNG has a database of their sold coins that goes back a long while.

And I'm up and running! I have a scraper that parsed every single lot of an auction. With 1200ish lots, that's enough to do some proof of concept testing with ML models before writing a more general parser and grabbing every record.