What should a product show when the source data is incomplete?
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I’m building a small tool that reads a company’s website to find its name, description, and logo. I thought getting those details from the company’s own site would be straightforward. It hasn’t always been.
Some sites leave fields out or put different information in different places. My instinct is to try a sensible fallback, then be honest when the tool still can’t find a reliable answer. A confident-looking guess would be easier to display, but less useful to someone relying on it.
If you build with public web data, how do you handle that moment? Where do you draw the line between a helpful fallback and a guess you shouldn’t show?
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I draw the line by the cost of being wrong. In my lyric videos, speech recognition gives a time for each sung word, and it sometimes misplaces words across an instrumental break, once by about 16 seconds. There the fallback is a guess and I show it anyway: a line nothing matched is placed between its neighbours by word count, because a line a second off is harmless. If someone acts on your output, like a logo going on their own page, I would rather show nothing found than a confident wrong one. A guess is fine when it is cheap to be wrong and easy to see.