Bitcoin Forum

Update: Seeking merchants. First three to sign up and send their inventory list can put a banner on the homepage with free click-throughs for a month. Asking for just a small 2 BTC total for 3 months of the service, to be split to the programmers. Private donations graciously welcome.

The idea is to run a simple search engine that goes through the listed inventory of products that can be bought from bitcoin-accepting sites. To keep things simple, for any matches for a given input, the output results would be a link to the business home page, not actual product url. But users would know that they could then follow that link, and the product WOULD be available on their site (up to them to be in stock). As far as the algorithm for positive results with multiple business matches, I would like to keep it randomized so there is no bias to alphabetical or signup order. Perhaps a pay-for-first-results link could be implemented if there were ever more than a handful of matches.

Programmers - would you want to code the search engine itself? Graphically this is a low-frills project to get it up. I would like the search to have some smarts though.

Businesses - would you like to be listed (either a flat fee or click-through ads on the home page, no fee for search results)? If you don't have any digitized inventory lists, would you be willing to create one? If so I am willing to create tags if you want me to so that searches can become more generic in the future.

For example, for now I would like to return results for "ATI Radeon HD 5970" (hypothetical item description which comes from a business' inventory spreadsheet), but on my own time I would end up putting tags "graphics" and "card". The search would be tailored to show results for one or all words in the product description, and include an option to include tags if wanted.

In my mind this will enable people to easily see if they can buy a specific product from a bitcoin-accepting vendor.

I will absolutely not accept indexing any sites that are offering illegal goods or services.

Anybody want to be involved?

Very interesting idea, and yep, im quite interested, I've been coding on and off for the last 4'ish years, and PHP for the last couple, so i'de be able todo it.
If you want to talk more my skype is TheNetWasMyIdea :)

-SW

Thanks for the interest. I am hoping to get enough merchants to chime in and then we can start talking more. For you and any other potential programmers reading, I also want to get an idea of your 1) Interest in doing this for more of a large royalty/stake or alternatively a principal cost plus interest paid back by revenue over time than for an upfront project fee (is that a dealbreaker?) and 2)Whether you could be a part of a small team with 1 or 2 other coders.

Essentially I am looking for some people like me who sees this as something that would be a step in the right direction for the community, and that doing it right over time could result in a better payout. Something we could say is the site "we" built and not just some code you programmed and sold me. Ideally it is a continuing association, and for upgrades we mutually agree on what can be done so you're not just a hired gun. Say I can message you and say "hey can this be added" and you say "yeah I could do that" or "how about this instead" instead of "that'll be $xx for x hours of work." Then you program the new feature while I communicate with merchants. We understand that we should make a better site to get more traffic, because we both have an ownership interest.


Feel free to send responses to PM.

Yeah, I don't really care how I get paid, if I even do (i'd be happy with donations or something), and it really depends how the other people code and stuff aswell :)

I'm interested also. I don't mind about payment. bitcoin donations is enough for me. No problem to be a member of a group up to 3 programmers.

Thanks for the responses! Please note that I am very serious about being generous to anyone who is in this, if profits on my end become a reality. I think having two guys available to do work at different times would be great, and so would collaborating on a certain script to get more done than you could have yourself.

The two of you may want to message each other and discuss your skillsets, and hit it off, if you will.

I have to get some sleep now, but expect a group discussion soon if I can get some merchant contacts.

Preliminarily: The first merchants to sign up will pony up some BTCs to the programmers for the rights to have their database added to the search engine for 3 months. Renewal is therefore on a quad-annual basis. Listing rates and inventory lists can be updated at that time.

Seems like a good idea. Don't forget though that people won't want to pay much until you have lots of eyeballs and you won't get eyeballs until you have something to search through. I don't know what model is best, but you might give a free month or something. People are going to be more likely to get a list and give it to you if they get something for free and then more likely to keep paying if it gets them some traffic/sales and won't require anything but payment to keep going.

Another plan might be to make it wider than a bitcoin merchandise engine, like everything bitcoin to get people using it and then charge merchants either for placement in a shopping section or at the top whenever they would be relevant. Just throwing things out.

Edited OP with an offer to merchants. If I can get a similar amount of private donations from potential users, I can pass that on the programmers and waive the merchant fees for the early adopters instead.

Still seeking any comments from potential users. Thanks freemoney.

How much of the profits are you realistically looking to share?

Less than your $60,000 project fee + 50% ownership offer.

1. How generous? How many hours are you expecting it to take to go live?
2. Better site != more traffic, do you have a plan for acquiring more traffic?
3. Whats the long term plan for the site?
4. Are you going to have an APIs for merchants, how many types of Databases will you support?
5. What  kind of platform will this created be on?

What about Google Custom Search?

Thanks for the idea but a few things: 1)The cost of service 2)Want to keep this more of a community effort 3)As a utility, it doesn't serve the purpose I want. It would return multiple links per site for every subpage that contained the search result, whether it was in the store's inventory or not (if the website sold power supplies only, I don't want it to be a positive result for term "graphics card" because the store's description was "Power supplies that can power any graphics card there is". Each site with the product should actually get only one link, for now to the home page. However, I want to end up manually tying direct links to popular search terms, so that the results can link to the exact page.

Whats the domain of the site being developed?

Pretty sure custom search has a free option.

there's a big difference between feeding some API data and building an engine to crawl sites.

A bunch of pessimists.  What does it hurt to give it a try?  Bitcoin has to become more accessible somehow!

Exactly, and 24 hours later, the site is pretty much up and running, now we just need product lists from merchants :)

Hey man ... we got our first guy right above you. I'll update the collab site.

BitcoinBulletin already did this... he's crawling over a hundred sources. See the widget in the top left: http://www.bitcoinbulletin.com/
edit: search functionality is planned but not here yet

Couldn't participating sites keep a bitcoin.xml file in the root directory of their websites or something which would contain a list of all products and current prices? Websites can dynamically update xml files with cron jobs and the directory service/search engine only has to look for this file on all websites in the list.

Hmm, nice idea, thanks :)

I like this idea, also. It would be easy for a crawler to find out an xml file.