Around Christmas time UPCZilla began to get a huge amount of interest from the GoogleBot (Google’s crawler that goes around the net collecting content for its index). At one point it was hammering our site big-time, fetching up to ten pages a second. With that kind of load on the site you start to see …
This is probably not very exciting for the average user, but if you are linking to any of our product pages it is worth taking note: we have changed our link structure so instead of an ugly URL like: http://www.upczilla.com/upc-search/?upc=190198624505 …we have nice URLs like: https://www.upczilla.com/item/190198624505/ The latter look a lot better, we think, and …
Well, we’ve been working hard recently, scraping together UPCs from wherever we could find them, to try to break through the magic 1,000,000 and – we finally did it! It feels great, I don’t know about you but I don’t think I have ever had a million of anything in my life :). It’s not …
Some quick site news: UPCZilla is now fully secure, with SSL certificate implemented (see Comodo logo at the bottom of the sidebar), meaning all on-site content, external images etc. are going over secure https, so no nosey parkers can intercept what you are looking at on our site. There might be a very few external …
It’s been a huge week here at UPCZilla, bigger even than the day we launched, we think. First we migrated the whole site to new VPS hosting – the shared hosting was definitely not up to the job. Personally we have never set up a live web server from scratch (thank God for Bitnami) so …
Just to let you know we have reworked some of the code of UPCZilla to speed up page load times A LOT. This has basically meant loading some portions of the UPC data asynchronously (AJAX), whilst making sure there is some info displayed in the meantime for you to look at. We expect some teething …
Just to announce a little milestone – since launching back in May-June 2017 we have managed to expand our database of UPCs to 200,000 unique product codes! However, our counter above tells a different story. Unfortunately we realised we had to cull a large number of invalid codes that had crept into our database. We …
This is something we have been planning for a while but finally got round to implementing it: UPC barcodes for each product on UPCZilla. You can see an example here: The barcodes are generated using the Picqer PHP Barcode Generator library. Currently they are generated on-the-fly as caching them is not an option (our server would collapse under the weight …
Just a heads-up to let you know that in addition to UPCs and product keywords you can now also use our the UPCZilla engine to search for Amazon ASINs. Just type a valid ASIN in the search field at the top of the page and the engine should return the details of that product as well …