Show HN: Amazon Instant, weekend project

[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.

[lugg]

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

[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!

[pgrote]

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"

[fjw]

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

[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!

[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.

[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!

[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. :)

[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.

[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.

[blufox]

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

[m4rcadam]

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