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kingkool6...

January 15, 2009 04:12 AM

How can I get a list of random ASIN numbers?

ASIN is a unique identifier that Amazon uses for it's products. I would like a way to collect a bunch of random ASIN's for analysis. I tried creating random strings but each ASIN is different enough that a brute force guess and check isn't practical.

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shakespear...

January 15, 2009 04:22 AM

How about a quick crawler/scraper? The code is not hard to get a web page, find the links (<a href> tags), look for tags of a certain format representing products, then parse out the ASIN. Then repeat for a random link on each page that fits your criteria.

They won't be truly "random" in that there is likely to be some relation between the products, but it's a start. Run the crawler long enough and you'll have a big enough sample that you can then sample *that* and it'll feel more random.

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kingkool68

January 15, 2009 04:26 AM

Well they do have an API that would be a bit more efficient than actually scraping the page. There are things called browseNodes but that's about asfar as I've gotten.

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shakespear...

January 15, 2009 02:11 PM

You'd be surprised about the efficiency of APIs, you have to be in on the program and get your keys, blah blah blah, which I assume you've already done given your comment. And then you're limited to what their API lets you do. But it doesn't take any special access to scrape the page, and you can use whatever tools you can get your hands on. Many a business is founded on scraping content and reassembling it into a more useful structure. I've been at 2 companies now that do that, so crawler/scrapers are just another part of the toolbox to me.

If you've got any shell programming skills, get yourself a copy of the "wget" program, which automatically pulls down html pages to your file system. Once you've got it local (one hit to Amazon, so it's not even like they notice), you use the language of your choice to break it up and analyze it (I prefer Ruby). Part of what you'll find in any given page is more links. So when you need more stuff to analyze, just recursively go get more pages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wget

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