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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

#151

Hey, I have a Shopify store that sells e-paper calendars / smart screens. I tried to search for it but I could not find it. What should I do so your crawler can find me? https://shop.invisible-computers.com

Hi, you could drop an email to onboard@peppyhop.com and we will be happy to onboard you. Please add target geography like you would like to target Indian market or US market

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

#152

Cool project! As you scale, you may benefit from these two projects I maintain, and the Big Tech uses :) https://github.com/unum-cloud/usearch - for faster search https://github.com/unum-cloud/uform - for cheaper multi-lingual multi-modal embeddings Feel free to reach out with feedback and feature requests!

This is cool

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

#153

I hope you have better luck than I did! A few years ago, my partner and I built vendazzo.com (now defunct). It was an e-commerce search engine on products listed on Shopify shops (sound familiar? :)). At the time, we had > 100m products listed, and I don't remember how many shops we were indexing.. over 100k I think, but we had access to over a million. Overall, I think your approach is very similar to ours, but we m…

Im curious why you consider lack of users to be the problem. I would have described it as lack of revenue.

What plans did you have for generating revenue from the site? (Serious question - given your low costs it would seem like a tiny amount of revenue would gave been enough.)

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

#154
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?

Sounds like someone drank the Mongo kool-aid. You absolutely do not need Mongo, let alone Mongo Atlas. 25 million documents with ecommeece products is measly and should fit in a single 600 GB server

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

#155

Hey, I have a Shopify store that sells e-paper calendars / smart screens. I tried to search for it but I could not find it. What should I do so your crawler can find me? https://shop.invisible-computers.com

Hi, you could drop an email to onboard@peppyhop.com and we will be happy to onboard you. Please add target geography like you would like to target Indian market or US market

always be closing lol

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

#156

I hope you have better luck than I did! A few years ago, my partner and I built vendazzo.com (now defunct). It was an e-commerce search engine on products listed on Shopify shops (sound familiar? :)). At the time, we had > 100m products listed, and I don't remember how many shops we were indexing.. over 100k I think, but we had access to over a million. Overall, I think your approach is very similar to ours, but we m…

Im curious why you consider lack of users to be the problem. I would have described it as lack of revenue. What plans did you have for generating revenue from the site? (Serious question - given your low costs it would seem like a tiny amount of revenue would gave been enough.)

Our business model revolved around referrals, so lack of users directly translated to lack of revenue. While its true that even if we had millions of users but none of them were buying sponsored items we would have had a revenue problem, that wasn't the problem we were facing, as the few users we did have were in fact purchasing sponsored items.

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

#157
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had no capital, so advertising or solutions that basically involved "throwing money at the problem" were off the table for us. We spent time posting in forums helping people find items they were looking for, and we had a few posts here on HN that generated short-lived, explosive traffic bursts. I remember those days we had posts get picked up on HN, it was always an exciting night! We were looking at influencers a…

looks like simptoms of no market. maybe you were solving a problem already solved by amazon ? most shops on shopify also use amazon

Many shops do double list, this is true. However, I don't think its a solved problem. There are many people who do not want to shop on Amazon for their own reasons. There are also people who want to shop locally, and Amazon provides no mechanism to do so (that I'm aware of). There are also many smaller shops who simply cannot afford to list on Amazon, as there are considerable fees associated with running a successful business there. It was these smaller shops who we were initially building to serve, to provide a funnel for them.

Still, there were problems with our solution that if addressed may have provided a better market fit. If we had had more runway, we would have worked to address them, but that simply wasn't in the cards.

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

#158
post #78

Built the same thing a while back while collecting a lead list for sales. Not bothered to keep data updated but was a fun thing to build in a couple days. (disclaimer mobile experience is meh cause it was a fun project) https://zensear.ch How did you find list of all Shopify stores? I ended up just checking every .com, .net, etc as I didn't find an easy way to figure it out directly from shopify.

Nice. But can I ask what motivated you? I don't see any affiliate details in the links - do you monetise at all?

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

#159

Hey, I have a Shopify store that sells e-paper calendars / smart screens. I tried to search for it but I could not find it. What should I do so your crawler can find me? https://shop.invisible-computers.com

You’re live on Agora:

https://www.searchagora.com/products/invisible-calendar-6266...

Thinking that we should have a page where store owners can submit their URL to be crawled.

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

#160
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…

I’ll second the comments that $2k/month is alarmingly high, especially for the performance that you seem to be getting. When I shoved ~40M webpages into a stock ElasticSearch instance running on a 2013-era server I bought for $200 (on eBay), it handled the load when I hit the HN front page just fine. Either you’re being drastically overcharged or there’s something horribly inefficient in your setup that could probably be tweaked fairly easily to bring your prices down.
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