noapikey_amazon_rating

Amazon product rating API

Why?

Amazon doesn't give us an API for retrieving product ratings. Often while browsing other websites I need to copy paste the product name and input that into Amazon in order to know the rating.

I understand why Amazon doesn't enable such an API -- if you're on Amazon's site, you're more likely to buy the thing with One-Click, so here's my solution.

When searching github I noticed some other similar things, when you query for "amazon reviews" you get about 3 pages of repositories; many of these used an API key whereas I think in this case being anonymous/using no API key is better -- in any case for getting ratings data there is no API access anyway.

Userscripts

Comes with a Frys.com userscript that makes use of the API/service.

Install

Pull the code down to a server somewhere (or locally)
Start the server, using an environment variable for the port: PORT=8087 node server.js

Usage

The app provides two HTTP GET routes: /amazon/search/* and /amazon/rating/* each returns JSON.

Examples

Search

I had to add this first before I could get to the ratings data, as I decided to scrape the mobile site rather than the full site (~2 seconds faster)

time curl localhost:1337/amazon/search/Blueair%20403%20HepaSilent%20Air-Purification%20System
[
  {
    "name": "Blueair 403 HepaSilent Air-Purification System",
    "price": "$549.00",
    "url": "http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002A9JHBM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1/192-6657742-1570763?qid=1387685779&sr=8-1"
  },
  {
    "name": "Blueair 503 HepaSilent Air-Purification System",
    "price": "$659.00",
    "url": "http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002A9JHBW/ref=mp_s_a_1_2/192-6657742-1570763?qid=1387685779&sr=8-2"
  },
  {
    "name": "Blueair 203W HepaSilent Air-Purification System, White",
    "price": "$329.00",
    "url": "http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002A9JHB2/ref=mp_s_a_1_3/192-6657742-1570763?qid=1387685779&sr=8-3"
  },
  {
    "name": "Blueair 450E HepaSilent Digital Air-Purification System",
    "price": "$629.00",
    "url": "http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001FOG3Q0/ref=mp_s_a_1_4/192-6657742-1570763?qid=1387685779&sr=8-4"
  },
  {
    "name": "Blueair 403 Air Purification System",
    "price": "$499.95",
    "url": "http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0000668C1/ref=mp_s_a_1_5/192-6657742-1570763?qid=1387685779&sr=8-5"
  }
]
curl   0.01s user 0.01s system 1% cpu 1.170 total

Get Rating

This one uses the Search method above internally and returns the first result except with more product data, specifically rating data. This means it takes two requests to Amazon to complete. As you can see this is around ~1.7 seconds on my machine. I have seen it anywhere from 1.2 to 2.2 seconds.

$ time curl localhost:1337/amazon/rating/Blueair%20403%20HepaSilent%20Air-Purification%20System
{
  "name": "Blueair 403 HepaSilent Air-Purification System",
  "price": "$549.00",
  "url": "http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002A9JHBM/ref=mp_s_a_1_1/188-6919283-5895133?qid=1387685585&sr=8-1",
  "rating": [
    4.5,
    5
  ],
  "ratingPercent": 90
}
curl   0.00s user 0.00s system 0% cpu 1.721 total

Thanks

shouts to the FOSS works that made this easy to build quickly

nodejs
express
jsdom
jquery
sizzle

sorny/noapikey_amazon_rating