BitcoinStore and its horrible horrible searching function (Catalog API released)

[BitcoinStore]

Hello Bitcoiners!

We have to first off thank you for all the support you've given us and I doubt I'll ever be able to start off any announcements without mentioning how much we appreciate our customers. We spent a great weekend in San Jose last month meeting you guys face to face and I have to say that few companies have quite the loyal and generous customers that we do.

And I'm also coming to you with a bit of sad news, fixing our search function is harder than we expected. We knew it would be hard, but the tweaks we've been able to add have only made a bit of a difference.

But I had a thought about that... The Bitcoin community has never sat down and waited for something to happen. Most of the major institutions in Bitcoin were created by Bitcoiners. Nearly everyone in the community contributes in some way, whether it is a member of the Dev Team or a poster on this forum, everyone has contributed in some way.

So, the world presented us with a broken banking system and we made our own; what if I present you with an API to BitcoinStore's catalog, and request a better way to search?

Here's the end goal: provide some workaround that will allow our customers to better find what they're looking for, that will work for a couple of months until we can really fix our search on our site (to do so will probably require coding a custom search function.)

I have been presented already with a couple ideas to do this:

• A Firefox/Chrome plugin that shows up on NewEgg or Amazon when they have a BitcoinStore product.
• An offsite web-app that provides clearer/simpler search
• Or perhaps some other idea

Anyways, here's our API: https://www.bitcoinstore.com/api/rest/products
(add ?page=X to see page X)

I'm thinking people will be able to pull from there to create a database that they can use to do search functions on. Simply updating the catalog every couple of hours should allow the sites to see any changes in availability.

Please let me know if anyone needs additional features or information on the API. I don't think you can place orders through the API yet (probably due to security issues), but I'm sure we'll be able to clear some sites to do so in the future.

Furthermore, if someone provides a beautiful workaround using the API, I will be more than happy to toss a couple bitcoins your way. This is by no means a contest, but I'm happy to provide a financial reward.

Thank you so much for your support, and I look forward to the responses on this thread!

-Jon

[apetersson]

i have some experience with custom search engine solutions. i worked for a year on the search team of a yellow pages company (using FAST) and coded a tailor-made customer search for an insurance broker.
in my experience, getting this somewhat right is a month-long project. getting as good as amazon = years and big team.

good luck!

[greyhawk]

From what I've seen at bitcoinstore (admittedly I haven't looked longer than 5 minutes for fear of eye cancer) and my rather extensive experience with integration of multi-source catalogue data, your problems are not related to search.

Your problems are related to the horrible horrible state of your catalogue data, which seems to be imported directly as supplied by suppliers. Which doesn't work. It never does.

You'll need data analysts to manually go through supplied data and set up conversion scripts to filter the crap out of supplied datasets and I'm not talking data format conversion but data content conversion. And as this will only clean up about 70% of the crap sets, you'll need an army of Indian data monkeys to manually go through the whole thing and clean that rest up according to your specific requirements, which you have had a team of data analysts construct in the last 6 months.

This is how Amazon does it, this is how other megastores do it, and it's worked out pretty well so far.

EDIT: This is important: Use Indian data monkeys, NOT Chinese data monkeys. Yes, even though they are much more expensive. Not trying to be rude to the Chinese here, but Indian data monkeys supply vastly superior data quality in a project like that due to the widespread use of English in India. They may not speak it too well, but boy can they write it. And you need that data quality.

[bernard75]

Is this somehow related to the search issue:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212618.msg2443098#msg2443098
Or is pretty much anything "Out of stock"?