Agora: A search engine for Shopify products

Hi HN! I built Agora as a side-project leading up to the holiday season. I wanted to find an easier way to find Christmas gifts, without needing to go store-by-store.

My wife asked me for a a pair of red shoes for Christmas. I quickly typed it into Google and found a combination of ads from large retailers and links to a 1948 movie called 'Red Shoes'. I decided to build Agora to solve my own problem (and stay happily married). The product is a search engine that automatically crawls thousands of Shopify stores and makes them easily accessible with a search interface. There's a few additional features to enhance the buying experience including saving products, filters, reviews, and popular products.

We've started with exclusively Shopify stores and plan to expand the crawler to other e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix, etc. The technical challenge I've found is keeping the search speed and performance strong as the data set becomes larger. There's about 25 million products on Agora right now and we'll ramp this up carefully to make sure we don't compromise the user experience.

I'd love any feedback! And open to any advice on improving the search experience.