Amazon product listings and reviews are such a cesspool these days. It's a travesty.
It's completely impossible to tell good quality stuff from useless garbage (especially since they are usually commingled in the same listing), and often it's impossible to find good quality stuff at all under the barrage of listings of the same two products with different fake brand names. The sorting options are a joke and the ratings are gamed so much they indicate nothing except how much the seller spent buying reviews.
It's amazing that Google hasn't been able to do better here.
You’d think someone would have come along who just scrapes Amazon’s listings, applies their own intelligent indexing heuristics, and spits out a new search/browse page that just links through to Amazon’s regular product pages. Like CamelCamelCamel, but for dimensions other than price.
I thought about trying to build something like this, but figured that I'd probably just get sued. Also I think matching listings to accurate product metadata would be practically impossible even if you had a good source for the metadata, and it still wouldn't fix issues like inventory commingling in the warehouse or bait and switch listings that reduce product quality over time.
AFAIK in the kakaku.com case, between kakaku.com and shopping sites are partner. Sites (including Amazon.co.jp) gets customers, kakaku.com gets affiliate fee. Why this model won't work in the US?
It's completely impossible to tell good quality stuff from useless garbage (especially since they are usually commingled in the same listing), and often it's impossible to find good quality stuff at all under the barrage of listings of the same two products with different fake brand names. The sorting options are a joke and the ratings are gamed so much they indicate nothing except how much the seller spent buying reviews.
It's amazing that Google hasn't been able to do better here.