{"slug": "show-hn-the-product-is-usually-snakeoil", "title": "Show HN: The product is (usually) SnakeOil", "summary": "A developer created SnakeOil, an app that scans product photos and analyzes them against scientific research to rate their effectiveness. The tool identifies products, researches their ingredients and marketing claims, then ranks them based on peer-reviewed studies while offering better alternatives.", "body_md": "| ||||||||||||\n1 point by |\nI built this app \"SnakeOil\", you snap a pic, it derives what product it is, how it's made, what's marketed for. then it goes and researches actual papers on the problem and ranks it on how effective the product is to solve the problem it's marketed for and gives you better suggestions for solving the problem. it uses different AI api's for different task (sourcing products, finding papers, reading research, ranking products) to finally return suggestions, scores and the gap between the product you've scanned and what actually works, quoting the research behind it. | |||||||||||\n|", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-the-product-is-usually-snakeoil", "canonical_source": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278662", "published_at": "2026-05-26 12:13:12+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-26 12:38:26.540351+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-products", "ai-tools", "computer-vision", "natural-language-processing", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["SnakeOil"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-the-product-is-usually-snakeoil", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-the-product-is-usually-snakeoil.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-the-product-is-usually-snakeoil.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-the-product-is-usually-snakeoil.jsonld"}}