Extract prices from product searches

Kagibeh

I'm not quite sure if Kagi even should be doing this, but:

Today I was searching for bathroom tiles and very quickly found myself switching to Google search, as Google (being a shopping centered engine) will try to extract product prices and directly place them under the search results. It's not perfect (can be done better) but of course, if you know your product price and are looking for a site to beat it, it can be very useful. Additionally, it will help you identify sites that sell the product in the first place.

I'm totally fine with switching to Google for this specific purpose, just pointing it out as a possible feature. The beauty of a search engine doing this is that it can bring up every and any shop, as oposed to a dedicated price search engine, that will typically only return the stores that are willing to pay a commission.

Vlad

Kagibeh Are these actually accurate?

Kagibeh

Vlad

It's a bad example. I simply entered a manufacturer to show the numbers and their location. But if you enter a unique product name, they typically are. The weakness under Google isn't so much wrong numbers or products, but not recognizing a store/price and not displaying it at all.

Vlad

Kagibeh My point is if google can not get these numbers right, there is a low chance that we can either.

frin

Even if the price were correct, it should display the date when the price was fetched/cached.

Kagibeh

They do get them right - as mentioned, I find their service very useful. As just imagined that it may not be so nice to have a bunch of users telling you they want everything "as in Google", which is why I pointed out that there's still room for improvements. 😉

Kagibeh

Date when the price was fetched is a good idea imho.

carl

Could this be as easy as looking for any €, $ or other currency symbol and look if there's a number next to it. Of course it would be very error prone, but better than nothing.

Or if you want to be strict, look for the price attribute from Schema.org structured data: https://schema.org/price

Kagibeh

Unfortunately, it's more complicated than that. If you open a random shopping page, you will notice that price tags are all over the place. Even if the page itself is for a dedicated product, it often comes in various shapes, sizes or flavors, but above all, you always have the related/recommended products and whatnot.

I suppose the best bet to get this done would be to analyse shopping software and plugins. A ton of sites are Wordpress based, and the number of popular templates is probably limited. If you check them out and see which tags or form fields are used where, it's maybe not so hard to figure out the price on any give page.

Since Google are both lazy and powerful, I'm also wondering if they didn't put some rules out there ("follow these rules if you want us to extract your prices"). If such rules exist, they can, of course, be exploited by anyone.

Btw. my hunch it's better to miss a few pages than to have too many false positives.