The latest articles on DEV Community by Keith Hon (@keithhon). https://dev.to/keithhon https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F813878%2Fe637fcb6-1247-420a-92b3-a2fb094f59f3.jpeg https://dev.to/keithhon en Keith Hon Sat, 12 Feb 2022 05:03:55 +0000 https://dev.to/keithhon/how-i-built-a-product-searching-site-from-scratch-with-nextjs-and-got-937k-visitors-in-6-months-2nhg https://dev.to/keithhon/how-i-built-a-product-searching-site-from-scratch-with-nextjs-and-got-937k-visitors-in-6-months-2nhg <p><a href="https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--nbD-bkNB--/c_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto%2Cw_880/https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/2m30p46j36scs3sm5o1e.PNG" class="article-body-image-wrapper"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--nbD-bkNB--/c_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto%2Cw_880/https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/2m30p46j36scs3sm5o1e.PNG" alt="Image description" width="689" height="565"></a></p> <p>I’m going to show you how I built a product search site using Next.js and Elasticsearch in 6 months by myself.</p> <p><strong>How Everything Started</strong></p> <p>The idea of making a search engine for products came to me one day when I started an e-shop selling electronics in Hong Kong. Since the shop has little reputations built yet, I adopted the strategy of being the cheapest seller in the web. I searched for the same the product online and mark it as the lowest price on the web. I thought: </p> <blockquote> <p>There will be lots of enqueries and potentials buyers as most people should decide where to purchase based on the price.</p> </blockquote> <p>Obvisouly, it didn’t turn out the way I planned. Since searching cost is high as pricing information is hard to get without spending lots of time browsing over the internet.</p> <p>So as a developer I ask myself</p> <blockquote> <p>Why is it so hard to find the cheapest price for the same product in Hong Kong? Can I make it easy and simple?</p> </blockquote> <p>I started to think about this problem and I came up with the idea of a product search engine which could crawl all the eshops in Hong Kong and compare the prices for the user.</p> <p><strong>Technical Stack</strong></p> <p>The first step was to find a technology stack that I could use to build the product. I looked into a few different options and I eventually decided to use Next.js and Elasticsearch.</p> <p>Next.js is a great framework for building React applications and it makes it really easy to get started. And Elasticsearch is a great search engine for indexing and searching through large amounts of data. Moreover, Next.js has built-in support for Server side rendering, which is brilliant for Search Engine Optimization.</p> <p><strong>The Final Product</strong></p> <p>After 6 months of development, I finally had a product that could crawl most of the eshops in Hong Kong and compare the prices for the user. If you are interested, you may check it out at <a href="https://moredeal.org/">https://moredeal.org/</a>.</p>