We reported last week that some API problems had caused some of our price info providers to break, limiting our price comparison results almost entirely to Amazon and eBay. We don’t like that, our users don’t like that, and Google doesn’t like it either – in fact Google has stated in the past that a price comparison listing should comprise price data from at least 3 different sources. This has resulted in a bit of a hit to our Google positioning too, but hopefully everything should recover now. Now we have results from retailers like Walgreens, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Unbeatable Sale and many, many others – to make sure our users can always find the best price online. Phew.
Reverse UPC searches were also broken, they are now back up and running and in fact we have improved them so now you can search for, e.g. Samsung EVO, and now get back far more results from different stores than before.
For the techies: the problem arises because online data is being supplied in ever-changing formats and using ever-changing access methods. XML is falling out of favour, some providers are doing away with REST as a method, JSON is in, and now GraphQL too, and every time it can involve learning some new technologies and doing a significant rewrite – it’s all too much for a humble hobby developer to keep up with, but we do our best! No doubt just as I have implemented these latest changes, someone will change up their APIs again. No REST for the wicked, I guess (see what I did there)…