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Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine

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Re: Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine

#61
post #22

Cool! But how did you get the initial dataset of 643,000+ Shopify stores (data as per your “About” page) in the first place, to then scrape the products from their /products.json feeds? Or did you just try a huge list of domain names at random?

https://www.shopify.com/robots.txt lists a lot of sitemap files, which tend to be a good starting point.

It seems sort of questionable to use the list of things to not scrape as a starting point for scraping.... I mean, I get it's not actually enforced.

Re: Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine

#62

I'm sorry, but I have to question where this heartfelt story about looking out for your wife is in any way real? The website certainly doesn't look like a side project, it has a fully fledged system for merchants to advertise on Agora for a fee, an affiliate system offering $50 commissions to onboard merchants and the ToS and Privacy policy link to a website with the following mission statement: > We buy, build, and…

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Re: Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine

#63
post #37
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.shopify.com/robots.txt lists a lot of sitemap files, which tend to be a good starting point.

Did this suddenly get changed? Nothing but "# ,: # ,' | # / : # --' / # \/ />/ # /" is shown now.

For some reason, "view source" gets the right list. Maybe a referer issue like someone else said.

Re: Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine

#64
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. I think it did change. Google cache shows a 2229 line file: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

Seems it might be looking at the referrer. Loading https://www.shopify.com/robots.txt from clicking the link shows the weird line while opening it in a private browser window shows the right one.

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Re: Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine

#65

I'm sorry, but I have to question where this heartfelt story about looking out for your wife is in any way real? The website certainly doesn't look like a side project, it has a fully fledged system for merchants to advertise on Agora for a fee, an affiliate system offering $50 commissions to onboard merchants and the ToS and Privacy policy link to a website with the following mission statement: > We buy, build, and…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine

#66
post #10

Agora also doesn't return red shoes for the search query "red shoes". Seems like you haven't fully solved the problem yet :) From a technical perspective, crawling 25M products is impressive but the search itself doesn't provide much value to me. I already use large e-commerce sites (amazon, wallmart, ...) and targeted ones (Nordstrom, SSENSE, ...). Sure I may not be searching through all the shopify, wix stores but…

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Re: Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine

#69
post #37
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.shopify.com/robots.txt lists a lot of sitemap files, which tend to be a good starting point.

Did this suddenly get changed? Nothing but "# ,: # ,' | # / : # --' / # \/ />/ # /" is shown now.

It's just your browser's HTML parser. Line 6:

  #                         / 
This is being interpreted as a malformed HTML closing tag, which (according to the HTML5 parsing algorithm published by WHATWG) gets treated as a comment. The file doesn't contain any > past this point. This leaves the uncommented contents from lines 1–6:

  #                               ,:
  #                             ,' |
  #                            /   :
  #                         --'   /
  #                         \/ />/
  #                         /
Or, with whitespace collapsed:

  # ,: # ,' | # / : # --' / # \/ />/ # /
Which should be exactly what you observe.

Ref: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/white-space...

Re: Show HN: I scraped 25M Shopify products to build a search engine

#70

I'm sorry, but I have to question where this heartfelt story about looking out for your wife is in any way real? The website certainly doesn't look like a side project, it has a fully fledged system for merchants to advertise on Agora for a fee, an affiliate system offering $50 commissions to onboard merchants and the ToS and Privacy policy link to a website with the following mission statement: > We buy, build, and…

OP here. Yup, haven't launched the holding company yet but idea is to have an LLC for all my software projects. Still a work-in-progress in both thinking and execution. Agora specifically came from a personal need and is obviously still an MVP project. Spun up a Merchant Page and Affiliate Program page in a few hours on Webflow using a template. There is a merchant dashboard built but the 'affiliate program' is a tes…

How is "Jaggi Enterprises LCC" involved, where for example the terms lead to?
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