Three and a half year ago I started a very nice project with Oliver Dauben: amascore. Based on a collection of technologies (where some where quite hip at those days), like JSP, XML, Webservices (Amazon ECS), Java and JDBC, we created a search engine upon the Amazon product database where the ranking of the search result is calculated from an analysis of customer reviews. Here, the relative review scoring is such that a product with many 4 star reviews may rank higher that an product with only one or few 5 star reviews.

The project reached an almost final stage with amascore 2.1 in 2005. Later in 2005 we abandoned the project because our priorities shifted.

A few days ago my stuff moved to a new server, and so did amascore. The search engine wasn't running smoothly anymore and I had the choice to shut it down or to make it run. So I reviewed code, removed a lot of bugs, installed the latest JRE and the latest servlet container (tomcat), tweaked the JSP and CSS at bit.

The result is amascore version three point zero.

Tags:amascore, amazon, search