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Old 10-30-2009, 01:19 AM   #1
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Wink bug possibly? a request or two, plus questions :)

lots of demands already, haha...

first of all, i recently discovered the 'camel' sites actually via the addon by accident... i absolutely love it, and i'm glad that happened! thank you to the author for such a useful concept! i use it nearly every day and it'll always be in my firefox add-on list for sure.

anyways, i had one small issue tonight... i tried reading the help area, but i cannot tell if this is a bug or if it is just a technical thing, or if it's just me this is what i was trying to track at camelbuy:

the 'track this product' icon is up on the page (though no price history graph sidebar) but when I click it, i get the message "unable to find the requested product". i tried manually putting the URL into the search box, the SKU, etc.. same result. i will note that i *was* able to add a different product, so i know there's something special or whatever about those links. the only thing I can think that is different is that they are actually on sale right now, and may be some featured item, that somehow may have caused the url to change? just guesses. i also noticed it wasn't in the local DB... here is the link:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Memorex+...=1110264240159

or

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olstempl...questid=129938


same product, just 100 pack and 50 pack of dvd+r's. i find it odd that the URL's are quite different for one. one using a java page, the other using a (perl?) script? either way, i couldn't get it to add the product to the site. just wanted to report that if it was some kind of bug that could be fixed, or if it could give you any insight to any weird practices BB might do to screw your code up.

but aside from that, i am curious as to how products actually get indexed on the camel sites.

my assumption is that when a user manually adds/tracks a product, that product is entered into the local DB, where it begins its tracking history for the charts, etc. so ultimately, it's sort of a community fed system? if so, that would be all the more reason to get more people using it...

great thing, totally.. the only minor bummer is the lack of any history, etc on about half or so of the products i try to view the price graph on, but i'm also realistic and understand the near impossibility to have every product on these sites tracked/have histories. i feel it will improve with time, so i'm not worried about it.


another request would be to just add sites as you can... i think buy.com would be a good one to add, since they often have a lot of deals and sales. i have also heard of meritline.com on a lot of these deal tracker sites (though I cannot vouch for them personally, as i've never ordered from them before). so my request is basically just to keep up the great work, add features and sites as you can, i'd love to see this one progress with new features, sites, preferences, etc. not many other extensions that i actually care to keep up with development, but this is a goodie.

aaand finally, just wanted to re-iterate what i posted/responded to the original request thread about the possibility of doing a superimposed history graph on the product page, so you could immediately see the price patterns and histories of the different sites at once to easily compare. i know you said you were limited by certain factors, but just a neat and helpful idea i think, if it could be done.

you do plan to continue developing this, right? nothing I hate more than a great project go stale and abandoned. the camel must live on... become more powerful... take over the world!
 
Old 10-30-2009, 01:17 PM   #2
Dan
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Welcome aboard! May your stay be long and pleasantly Camel-related.

You found a server move-related bug in the Camelbuy search engine. It wasn't returning any results at all That should be resolved though...thanks for taking the time to post about it!

As for your two product links, the first one can now be put into the Camelbuy search box and it will return the right product. The second however doesn't contain the SKU so we aren't able to look that up at this time. Fortunately you can search for its SKU (7141844) and it will show up.

Our Amazon and Best Buy sites add products as users search for or view them. All other sites contain complete product catalogs. Product data (prices, availability, etc), for all sites except Amazon, is updated at least once daily for every product. But our Amazon site monitors so many products that we only do (at least once) daily updates for those products which users are actively tracking, so if you care about something be sure to create a price watch for it! Products that nobody is watching tend to get updated every few days.

Our data will indeed improve with both time and more users. Feel free to help spread the word :]

We are looking at adding new sites like Tiger Direct and Walmart. Perhaps I'll post a thread/poll about it to gauge where user interests lay. After all, it's about what the users want!

The Camels are my current main project (outside of my day job), and I'll keep developing it as long as we're all having fun doing it. More users posting on the forums definitely helps keep me motivated, so I'm really glad you decided to post a thread.
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