

Show HN: Findsimilar.info - my weekend project - chunkyslink
http://www.findsimilar.info/

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chunkyslink
I’m often interested in buying some book, film or piece of music based on
someone I already know I like. The logic goes something like – ‘if I like this
I will like something similar’. Now it is already fairly easy to do this
online by using one of many websites providing this information but it is a
distraction to do so an requires navigating away from the work I am doing
engage in some website for a couple of minutes. I wanted something quick and
easy that would allow me to send off a request in less than 10 seconds then
get back to my work. The information is now waiting for me when I’m ready to
disengage from what I’m doing.

Its also command line-esque which I prefer than clunky interfaces.

I use Tweetie for Twitter which is always open and in less than 10 seconds I
can have it open with a quick command line style query written and being
processed while I get back to work.

To give it a go have a look at <http://www.findsimilar.info> to see how it
works and what you can search for.

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yread
Cool idea. But could you make it accessible to the poor sods who don't have a
twitter and don't feel like making an account just for that (like me)?

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chunkyslink
ok leave it with me. Sounds like an interesting challenge.

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TamDenholm
It'd be nice to hear how to made it, what language, any problems etc etc.

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chunkyslink
Sure. It was made very quickly with PHP and AWS SDK for PHP which can be found
here <http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforphp/>.

I used a cron each minute to scrape twitter and search for the tweets to the
@findsimilar account. These are then stored in a MySql table. Another script
then runs over them and looks for the hashtag.

At this point we search a different part of Amazon depending on what is being
searched for. The results are stored again in MySql tables (one for the page,
one for the Artists / authors and one for the products).

I then used wildcard DNS entry for *.findsimilar.info and the same for apache
so that we can use the format xxx.findsimilar.info which will be good for seo
and also easy to guess.

In essence that is it. The biggest problem I can see is when someone is an
author, artist and actor. We have a namespacing problem. Perhaps I need to add
xxx.findsimilar.info/actor /author /artist

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daystar
would be great to have a web interface.. for 1. convenience and 2. privacy as
i wouldn't want people that check my twitter timeline to know that i'm trying
to find something similar to _fill in the gap_

