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System design interview question

Design a price tracking service (CamelCamelCamel)

Medium · System design (HLD)

The prompt

"Design a price tracking service. Users pick products on retail sites and get alerted when the price drops below a threshold. You show price history charts going back years. You do not have an API — you read prices from public web pages, and the retailers would rather you did not."

What this round really tests

scheduling scarce, unreliable work against an adversarial source. You cannot check every product often; you are blocked if you try; and the data you get is untrustworthy. The discriminating insight is that crawl budget must be allocated by expected value, not uniformly.

Clarifying questions worth asking

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