

Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project - fjw
http://amazon.frankjwu.com/

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alialkhatib
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.

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fjw
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!

~~~
alialkhatib
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/](http://camelcamelcamel.com/)

~~~
xur17
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.

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pgrote
Kaspersky reports the URL as a phishing site.

"The requested URL cannot be provided

URL:

[http://amazon.frankjwu.com/](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"

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

~~~
anilgulecha
Waiting to look at the code :)

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

Cool weekend project either way. Props.

~~~
fjw
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!

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

~~~
fjw
Check out Amazon's Product Advertising API: [https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...](https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html)

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

~~~
lugg
You can browse category nodes too iirc

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

~~~
fjw
Oops, personal oversight! Thanks, added it in.

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Zombieball
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!

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tmlee
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.

~~~
lgas
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. :)

~~~
tmlee
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.

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xur17
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.

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

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

~~~
metrue
max-height and fixed width, my way too.

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

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m4rcadam
Good job! See now if I use your server I won't get ads for every single item I
do a search for ^^

