Building a Google Products Alternative?

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G4JC
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Iscritto: 03/11/2012

Hello All,
I have been thinking for some time about this, and it seems there is no current alternative to Google Products, BizRate, etc.

Additionally, the non-free ones mentioned do not respect ethical issues by primarily supporting eBay/Amazon.com and others.
http://stallman.org/amazon.html

So, I'm throwing this out there in hopes that others might find such a project interesting and help me get in touch with the right people and legal jargon needed to get this idea working.

1) Build and Open/Libre Database. The first thing we may need to do, is recreate UPCDatabase.com, as this site no longer allows free access to the database. Google Products and others use this database often to take a title/keyword and then crawl for it on the web based on it's likely UPC/EAN.

2) Create a universal and open template for submitting feeds.
Current non-free feeds and methods:
https://www.singlefeed.com/partners/engines.php
http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2009/10/sample-data-feeds-and-feed-specifications-for-comparison-shopping-engines/

This feed would need to include:
Everything required to help find and generate quality listings, at minimum -
Title, Description, GTIN, Image, Price,Sale Price, Shipping Cost, Quantity(?).

* Fulfillment method - e.g. what third-party (such as Amazon) is shipping the items, or self.

* Hardware id. For querying h-node compatibility of electronic goods.

* Licensing??? Perhaps GNUFDL/CC0, or who knows.

3) Ability to detect freedom issues -
* Query known unethical manufacturers: http://www.knowmore.org/ with icon
* Query known good foods: http://howgood.com/ with icon
* Give "Respect Your Freedom" icon on known fully free hardware.
* Flag anyone detected using a monopoly like Amazon ?
* Give major sites eBay/Amazon bottom priority, or non at all. In this way independent websites will once again get SEO and people wanting to support small businesses can easily do so.

4) Implement this as an open standard and make it Decentralized. This should be built easily into a retailers site in such a way YaCY and Seeks nodes understand (will require an upstream bug). It may be as easy as a sitemaps.xml-like implementation, a meta tag, or a specific location on websites. This does two fold, keeps people from having to send feeds to third parties, and allows anyone to crawl a site to find the data so that no single source holds the database. And since it is an open standard, DuckDuckGo could offer it centralized if they wish.

5) ??? - Such a task will require the cooperation of several already existing open projects. However I'm not sure the best way of getting them all on the same page. So hopefully this topic can help break the ice and get people looking into it. :)

G4JC
Offline
Iscritto: 03/11/2012

Ah and I almost forgot under section 2 and/or 3:
* Payment methods. Paypal/Dwolla/Amazon/BTC etc.
The first being the worst.