Abstract—In Japan, price comparison websites have become popular for finding and comparing the products from leading shopping websites. However, there are two drawbacks in product search of the price comparison websites. Firstly, customers cannot find new products of shopping websites that have not yet registered by the price comparison websites. Lastly, some product information of the price comparison websites is not up to date. In these situations, the customers need to search product information on shopping websites. This task is very time consuming. The objective of this research is to propose xSearchPro, a search tool that employs spreadsheet software as a user interface in performing cross-searching on Japan’s shopping websites. The cross-searching is realized by using product search APIs (Application Program Interfaces) of the shopping websites. This paper also presents a method that automatically extracts some product information from product webpages of shopping websites. xSearchPro outputs search results in a tabular format to enable efficient product comparison.
Index Terms—Search, user interface, spreadsheet, category, XML, JSON, website
Somchai Chatvichienchai is with Department of Information Security, University of Nagasaki, 851-2195 Japan (e-mail: somchaic@sun.ac.jp).
Yamato Itakura is with Department of Information Security, University of Nagasaki. (e-mail: bs217003@sun.ac.jp).
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Cite: Somchai Chatvichienchai and Yamato Itakura, "Proposal of a Spreadsheet-Based Search Tool for Cross-Searching Product Information of Japan’s Shopping Websites," Journal of Advances in Computer Networks vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 14-19, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0). (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)