Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project

amazon.frankjwu.com

24 pointsfjw29 comments

I get the impression that if this wasn't calling on a third-party API (ie if you were indexing the product listings yourself) you'd be able to give more "instant" results, but this is a cool take on search on Amazon (although obviously inspired by Google and other instant search features). I also imagine Amazon would blacklist you for harvesting their product listing, although since you're still giving them referrals maybe they wouldn't. I guess if you called it "aggressive caching" you might get away with it, heh.

While you're re-thinking product search, why not consider higher-resolution/larger thumbnails, a few more products per "page", etc...? I'm not advocating a Pinterest clone or anything like that, but the initial load (10 items in 2 rows) looks a little... dated and spartan.

As said before, cool short-term project. Would be interesting to see a few more features built into this, especially if it made your search "competitive" with Amazon's implementation.

I think it would be really interesting to download the entire listing and watch how volatile everything is, especially the item prices. Searching would definitely be much faster as well.

Thanks for checking it out and thanks for the suggestions!

That's a really interesting idea; tracking prices and potentially giving a Buy/Wait indicator would be really cool.

CamelCamelCamel[0] actually does some price tracking, but I'm not very familiar with what they do with it (with regard to giving advice on whether to buy or not). You might be able to grab some information from them on products via an API or scraper. I'm not seeing an API, nor do I see anything about using their data for other stuff, but I suppose it goes without saying that a really aggressive scraper wouldn't be welcome.

0: http://camelcamelcamel.com/

I've used CamelCamelCamel a few times - they let you choose a price, and they'll send you a notification when the price drops below that. Something that can determine when the price is at its lowest based on previous trends would be pretty neat.

Amazon would not ban you for this. They encourage it. They have throttling on though.

Kaspersky reports the URL as a phishing site.

"The requested URL cannot be provided

URL:

http://amazon.frankjwu.com/

Blocked by Web Anti-Virus

Reason: phishing URL

Click here if you believe that the web page has been blocked mistakenly.

Detection method: heuristic analysis"

:( Well, I'm planning on open-sourcing it after I clean up the code, so you could check it out then.

Waiting to look at the code :)

Sorry but what's the point? Like what issue with amazon search are you trying to solve?

Cool weekend project either way. Props.

Good question -- it's not really solving anything, it's just a different way of viewing Amazon products in a slightly more slick interface. It might save you a few seconds on a search, or it might not.

I mostly just wanted to play around with the Amazon API and AJAX calls. Thanks!

Which API are you using? Didn't know they had a product API.

Check out Amazon's Product Advertising API: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...

It supports Item Lookup, Item Search, Cart Creation, etc. Pretty cool!

You can browse category nodes too iirc

And you didn't set it up so that you can get "up to 8.5% in referral fees when the users you refer to Amazon sites buy qualifying products"?

Who cares, why is it wrong to get referrals?

+1 what's wrong in using referrals. Every web company out there is earning money more or less the same way.

It does not improve my search experience of save any time.

I'm amused by the fact that your drop-down menu doesn't include Amazon's original market: books.

Oops, personal oversight! Thanks, added it in.

Out of curiosity, did you just create your Amazon Affiliate account? I am not very familiar with the program but I have read stories about many folks being rejected from the program a week or two after signing up due to their sites "not having enough content".

Cool weekend project. Should be fun to see the code!

Looks great! I love instant search weekend projects! One thing i learn is also to disable keystrokes that do not change the search query; and you might want to do the same too. Perhaps do not execute the search, if keys like 'ctrl', 'alt', 'commamnd', etc is hit.

The easy way to do this is to use the changing of the value of the search field to trigger searches instead of caring about keystrokes at all.

Of course you probably don't want to send every single change either but thats beyond the scope of this comment. :)

That's true :) While for that, you give a delay for say ~.5 seconds once your hand is off the keyboard, then read the value in the form.

Neat project! One little thing - It looks like you are showing the list price - if you have access to it, the discounted price would be more useful.

Cool project. Don't force images to a set width/height. You're skewing them. Try using max-width & max-height

Thanks, changed! For some reason I originally used max-height and a fixed width.

max-height and fixed width, my way too.

Great Project. Just note that there is inconsistency with the price shown on your website for any items which are on sale.

Good job! See now if I use your server I won't get ads for every single item I do a search for ^^

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