Amazon Product Data
I realize I haven’t written much in the way of updates in the last few days. This is mainly because I’ve been enhancing the behind-the-scenes functionality of Zuggest.
In the first release, I was shooting for pure speed and hence not storing the product information coming back from Amazon. This I thought was a waste of great information. So last week I added a little thing to store the raw Product data in a huge text blob in the database. Just the raw data as I didn’t want to slow things down by inserting N number of products per keyword.
So on average I end up with about 10 products per keyword including the URL, the Small, Medium and Large images and Product Title etc. The last few days have been spent writing a data cleanser to extract and normalize this data. The thing works great and so far I’ve processed roughly 25% of the gathered data into over 4000 distinct products, all with links to Amazon.
Not sure what I’m going to do with this data but it’s tremendously useful and I’ve a number of ideas brewing which you’ll learn about in the next few days/weeks.
If you have any ideas, send them my way and I’ll see what can be done.
This would make a great front end to a Local Resource finder. Have it search core community databases such as a local enterprise faciliation center, shared-stuff datatbase, etc. It would search outward from where you are currently in concentric rings. Starting with your own skills/stuff (sometimes we forget what we already have.) Then it searches your nearest neighbors, your local community, bio-region, nearest connecting bio-regions etc. Of course it only searches information that has been freely volunteered. I would like to explore possibilities with you on this sometime.