you have cheap fuel. Really. http://imgur.com/r/MapPorn/YIpi5

oh, interesting. I wasn't aware of any, but I didn't look massively hard (all those stores with an API that I am aware of were different to each other). Having now looked I am no closer to finding such an animal. Got a link?

That would mean everyone who wants to use it would have to register as an Amazon API developer themselves - and the registration process is a bit more involved than setting up an Amazon shopping account or even an affiliate account. You have to declare what you are developing and give them a URL to your site and other things. I could have a preference setting where people put their API codes which would then get passed to the web service and then on to Amazon, however that doesn't actually deliver any benefit whatsoever and it means it exposes their secret API codes to me (or to my server or whatever backend server they are using). You could run a local back end server and point the search client at localhost. I might write some instructions on doing that.

it is the key that wears it's underpants on the outside.
Those underpants have got a Windows logo on them for reasons of unspeakable evil.

If there was an open vendor neutral API to plug into I would do that. I don't have the resources that google shopping have got to screen scrape loads of stores. I am certainly up for adding more stores, but they have to expose a search API and preferably an affiliate scheme (they don't have to do that, but realistically I am going to prioritise those that do). The code is all GPL v2 so feel free to enhance it to work with multiple APIs and search back ends. I don't *want* to limit it to one vendor.

wow, thanks!

better now? I don't know what else you would like to see in a privacy statement but suggestions are welcome.

ah, fair point. I guess I was expecting people to be able to connect the dots a bit better. I will add the relevant info to the root page of the web service. It was an afterthought putting anything there other than a 404 error to be honest. Libertus Solutions is my company and if you take the products bit off the front of the URL you get to the contact details and so on. I just flung up the web service to make the client work. The back end is trivial, it reads the query string, uses boilerplate code to set up the amazon web services connection, gets a datastructure from Amazon and spits the results part of that structure straight out again. The only reason it isn't published is that it includes the non-shareable API keys, I might split those out into a separate file so I can publish it. If I could have done without the intermediary and got the client to hit Amazon directly I would have done, but that would require everyone who wanted to use it to register as an Amazon API developer (giving up *lots* of privacy).
At the moment it is doing the default logging of requests to /var/log/apache2/access.log because I haven't bothered to turn that off yet. I fully intend to do so because I don't want the log data because someone might legally demand it if I have it and I don't want to have to pay to defend my refusal to hand it over. I would rather not have it. I might get the back end to update some counters so I have some kind of daily load indicator but I certainly don't want to know what people are searching for.
I will get a report from Amazon about what products I have earned commission on if people purchase through my affiliate ID. If you change the affiliate ID to some other value then someone else will get those reports so do bear that in mind. If you remove the affiliate ID then I will insert mine on the server side, (or Amazon get the commission and they are more evil than me so it is for your own good) but if you really want to give nobody the commission (or give it to Amazon) then put garbage in the affiliate ID and the only evil organisation that will know what you are up to is Amazon itself.

yes, me too. There are quite a lot of more imaginative (and probably better written) extensions on https://extensions.gnome.org/ I would encourage you to have a browse and see what else you can do with your computer. Then buy stuff. This volcano won't hollow itself out you know - I need the commissions.

The Gnome Shell terminology is that this is a search provider. I use the lens terminology because that is the Ubuntu Unity name for the same thing and was the inspiration for it. Also I am quite narcissistic and figured it would get me some attention.

This is a third party extension that they are hosting on their site for third party extensions. Extensions are how you extend and configure Gnome Shell.

dunno if I should be feeding this comment, but here goes.
Unity is based on Gnome 3. Gnome Shell is based on Gnome 3. They are both shells for Gnome 3, but Unity is not Gnome Shell.
Gnome Shell was pretty grim once, (as was Unity) it is now really really good, and Unity is OK. Try it. I am guessing you haven't used Unity much either.
You can email Mark if you want to, or catch him on IRC he is quite responsive.

This isn't my primary source of income, we provide consultancy services around Free Software. This is just a bit of fun and an intellectual exercise in learning to do a gnome shell extension and figuring out how I would have done the Unity shopping lens if I had the opportunity to do it properly. If one day this earns me enough to meet the payout threshold of Amazon then I will be surprised and quite pleased.

This is a reasonable point of view, I just figured that someone was going to do it so it might as well be me - and if it was going to be done I might as well do it as inoffensively as possible!

Hi, I am Alan and I wrote it. I am not trying to get anyone else to pick up the intermediary role, I kind of like the idea of the floods of money pouring into my Amazon account, however I wanted to point out that other people have got the software freedom to fork the front end and run their own back end and do that. For the record, the back end uses the Amazon API PHP library and has boilerplate code to set it up, including the super sekrit API keys that I can't include in an open source client then after the boilerplate there are basically two lines of active code:
        $response = $amazonEcs->category($type)->responseGroup('Medium')->search($searchquery);
        echo json_encode($response->Items);
so it just spits out the "Items" array from the JSON it gets from Amazon as JSON.
It isn't a personal site as such, it is one of our company servers running at Hetzner in Germany. I am a joint owner of the company so you could say it is mine :)