Improving Search Engine Performance for e-Commerce Transactions using the REST-based API

This paper examined the difficulty in getting suitable and frequently updated prices for goods while shopping on e-commerce websites with the aid of price comparison websites. The study proposed to develop a price comparison search engine for e-commerce websites that will be faster, and possess a dynamic database frequently updated with prices of goods. This process is online-based, and the prices on the labels of displayed results of goods are hyper-linked to websites of different merchants who have these goods on their websites up for sale. Five price comparison websites were used as case study. The Representational State Transfer (REST) API was used to carry out search and time efficiency analysis of two goods across the five price comparison websites. This analysis was also carried out on the enhanced price comparison website as well with its own distinctive properties that differentiated its queryTime and totalTime from the other five. The resultant data showed that the crawler functions deployed in this study performed 0.6 seconds quicker than those already available in the five price comparison websites which were used as case study.