Crawling to the people

Yaniv let the cat out of the bag about some of our ideas for making other parts of the search and its relevant data open, free and accessible to all of us. I’d thought I’ll add some background and my thoughts on the subject. First, the idea was iterated a couple of times when we were in that place where you have a solution(s) and you are seeking a problem(s) to solve. [Read More]

Amazon Recommendations, Big Giant Collection Books, Reprints and New Editions

I really like Amazon. I really like Amazon’s recommendations and ever since I inputed most of my books into Amazon I get really good recommendations. There is one thing that bothers me, though. I recently made a big order from Amazon and included two books which I was long overdue in owning and reading them. The books were “Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul” and “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” both by Douglas Adams. [Read More]

Amazon Checkout Interface – Group to as few shipments as possible

I recently ordered a couple of books from Amazon. When reaching the check out screen I, obviously, selected to group my shipments to as few as possible. I then looked and saw that it was grouped into two shipments, one book should be shipped the next day and the other 4 should ship only on the 20th of March – almost two months afterwards! This was a bit strange considering the fact that Amazon showed that all books were in stock. [Read More]

Amazon E-Commerce Web Service API

I’ve recently experimented with Amazon’s E-Commerce Service. In general, it’s a very complete API giving you access to almost every piece of information including titles, images, prices (and historical prices) that Amazon stores. There were two things that were a bit problematic, in my opinion, which I think should be addressed. The first thing is the ItemSearch method. This method allows you to search for items answering a set of criterias. [Read More]

GoogleWorld the new Web and privacy

Whether it is Gmail, Google Base, Google Video, Google Answers, Froogle, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Google Maps and Google Toolbar, Google seems to be conquering the world by offering a lot of services in different and diverse areas. (You can get a good review of the various Google Services here) With your Google Account (which is also your Gmail email), Google can also track a person specifically and learn things about what him/her, what he/she searched for, shoped, interest in, etc. [Read More]