Store owners interested in a price comparison search engine for Bitcoin?

[joepie91]

I am currently working on a search engine/price comparison site for Chinese webshops (such as DealExtreme, BuyInCoins, etc.) and I figured that it may be useful to reuse that platform to build a price comparison and product search engine for the Bitcoin community. I have a question beforehand though:

How many people that are currently selling products online for Bitcoins, would be interested in providing periodic (daily?) database dumps in for example XML format, for their product database to be imported into such a site? For the Chinese webshop comparison site I had to write crawlers by myself because the customer service of these webshops did not understand the requests for databases... but it would be a lot easier if stores could just provide XML dumps (or JSON, or any other proper format) with their products.

So, basically, if you run a Bitcoin store, and you are willing to provide a product database dump (I may be able to write some simple tools to dump the databases for some commonly used cart software), please post in this thread so I know if it's worth it!

[joepie91]

Noone? 

[error]

Noone? 

Relax. This is a busy forum. Someone will read your message eventually.

[qikaifu]

interesting, I just came up the similar idea with you and post it on the project development sub forum.

I'm not a programmer, or else I'll start such project myself. I just know that this kind of search engine is not so difficult to set up but it will capture a lot of visits.

[joepie91]

Noone? 

Relax. This is a busy forum. Someone will read your message eventually.

I know, I was just... surprised that it pretty much got bumped down over half of the Marketplace topic list, with only 19 views and no responses at all... I'd expected a bit more response

[lacedwithkerosene]

You can use my domain searchbitcoinstores.com if you want for this. (As in, I could point the nameservers your way)

I attempted this project with a couple of other guys before I got too busy. We were going the manual inventory route with upload ftp access for vendors. Seemed like too much manual work for everyone involved considering how small the goods economy actually is.

[hippich]

I believe it is too soon. Successful startup should deliver what community needs and time when community wants it.

[Skeenz]

Hi joepie91,

Yeah, the community is not always super-quick to response to announcements.
Anyways, I think a comparison search engine would be great.
If you want, we can collaborate on the marketplace websites.

For my own search engine, http://bitcoogle.com , I manually review each website before accepting it into the list of websites to be searched.
As such, I could provide you with a list of sites that would be beneficial for you to include in your comparisons.

My projects only assists with locating desired information, which is why I think your price-comparison search engine is a good idea.

I hope you find success