I’m going to show you how I built a product search site using Next.js and Elasticsearch in 6 months by myself.
How Everything Started
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:
There will be lots of enqueries and potentials buyers as most people should decide where to purchase based on the price.
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.
So as a developer I ask myself
Why is it so hard to find the cheapest price for the same product in Hong Kong? Can I make it easy and simple?
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.
Technical Stack
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.
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.
The Final Product
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 https://moredeal.org/.
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