About & FAQ
What this site is, how it works, and what to expect from results.
What is Canadian Beverage Search?
An independent, on-demand search layer over public Canadian beverage retailer websites. You enter a product and a province; we query the relevant retailers in parallel and return product-by-store results with prices, availability, and (when you opt in) distance from your location. We are not affiliated with any provincial board or retailer.
How does the search work?
When you submit a search, we create a job and dispatch it to every retailer adapter that covers your selected province. Each adapter queries that retailer's public site or feed, normalizes the response, and reports results back. We deduplicate, rank by relevance and (optionally) distance, and stream them to you as they arrive.
Identical queries within a 15-minute window are served from a short-lived cache so we don't hammer retailer sites unnecessarily.
Why do results sometimes differ from the retailer’s own website?
- Timing: retailer inventory and prices change throughout the day. A result may be a few minutes stale, especially if it came from our 15-minute cache.
- Store-level vs. catalogue-level data: some retailers only publish provincial catalogue listings, not per-store stock. We label each result's confidence (high, medium, medium-low, low) so you know how reliable the availability signal is.
- Search interpretation: different retailers handle typos, synonyms, and product variants differently. We pass your query through, but each retailer ranks its own matches.
- Coverage gaps: not every retailer exposes every field (size, ABV, store hours). Missing fields are simply omitted, not guessed.
Always confirm price and availability with the retailer before making a trip or a purchase decision.
How often does the data refresh?
Every search hits the retailers live. There is no background crawl — data is only pulled when someone actually searches for it. Once a query runs, its results are cached for 15 minutes; after that, the next identical search refetches everything from scratch.
You can force a fresh fetch by waiting out the cache window or by changing any filter (province, city, category) so the cache key differs.
Which retailers are covered?
See the Coverage page for the current list of supported retailers, the provinces they serve, and what each one exposes (per-store inventory, pricing, store locations, etc.).
Do I need an account?
No. The site is fully usable without signing up. A small anonymous identifier is stored in your browser so we can show you your recent searches on this device — see the Privacy Policy for details.
Is this affiliated with the LCBO, SAQ, BC Liquor, or any retailer?
No. Canadian Beverage Search is an independent project. All product names, images, and inventory data belong to the respective retailers; we just help you search across them.