Live data from Hacker News

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

searchagora.com

111–120 of 286 posts

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

#111
post #57

What was the process for scraping 25M products ? I have always used standard python tools like selenium, bs4 and the like. But I'm guessing none of these work at scale. Could you talk about your process and key bottlenecks at that scale a little bit ? Also, how much did it cost ? ______________ A recommendation for how to improve search. Your base captions will be pretty bad. You can use spot instances on a smaller G…

25 million products is really not much at all to scrape.

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

#114

What's your revenue model? I see you expanded on the details of your $1.5K monyhly cost, but failing to see how you make money? Affiliates fees?

Right now, charging Shopify store owners $99 / product / month to give them a 'verified' tag and boost their product in search results. Currently not making money on affiliate fees.

I wanted to first prove that people would actually use this / find value in it. Fortunately a few merchants have reached out already via email to talk through the business model so this will likely evolve as we learn more.

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

#115
post #57

What was the process for scraping 25M products ? I have always used standard python tools like selenium, bs4 and the like. But I'm guessing none of these work at scale. Could you talk about your process and key bottlenecks at that scale a little bit ? Also, how much did it cost ? ______________ A recommendation for how to improve search. Your base captions will be pretty bad. You can use spot instances on a smaller G…

Great suggestions, looking into this right now. First time building something like this so definitely new to some of these tools. For scraping: Found that every Shopify store has a public JSON file that is available in the same route. The JSON file appears on the [Base URL]/products.json. For example, the store for Wild Fox has their JSON file available here: https://www.wildfox.com/products.json . Built a crawler in…

If you're already on AWS, I recommend switching to postgres for now. For context, I have 3 RDS instances, each multi zone, with the biggest instance storing several billion records. My total bill for all 3 last month was $661.

Postgres has full text search, vector search, and jsonb. With jsonb you can store and index json documents like you would in Mongo.

- https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/textsearch.html - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/05/amazon-rd...

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

#117
post #95

That's funny, I made a domain-specific version of this for canadian coffee deals. https://beangrid.mcconomy.org/

Which coffee seems to hit the best in Canada (your take). I find the espresso in Canada hasn't been as good as the coffee brands in the US but I'm open to possibilities. Also like the project!

personal somewhat-pedestrian list: Pilot, Detour, Reunion, Propeller, Phil and Sebastian

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

#118
Shopify has tried a few times to build a tool like this but hasn’t ever managed to get any traction. I think that missing any curation at all could be what eventually kills it. Their current attempt is https://shop.app and a query for red shoes is mostly red shoes.

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

#120
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great suggestions, looking into this right now. First time building something like this so definitely new to some of these tools. For scraping: Found that every Shopify store has a public JSON file that is available in the same route. The JSON file appears on the [Base URL]/products.json. For example, the store for Wild Fox has their JSON file available here: https://www.wildfox.com/products.json . Built a crawler in…

2.2k/mo right off the bat is pretty steep, especially if you're paying that while the search response reliably takes over 10 seconds. Why would you shovel 1.5k into MongoDB's pockets right off the bat? Especially when ElasticSearch is much better suited to what you're trying to do?

You could run this entire stack (yes, even for 25 million products) using Kubernetes in a $40/month Linode + Elasticsearch + Cloudflare free plan.
Post reply on HN