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How can I add an Amazon search box to my web page?

You have shown how to add eBay, Google, and Technorati searches to your own web page. Is it possible to add an Amazon search to your page, and how would you do it?


Dave's Answer:

Of course it's possible! Everything is possible on the Web. :-)

My first step is to go to Amazon.com and do a search, just to see the resultant URL. In this case, a search for Harry Potter reveals this scary URL:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-1882688-6100927?initialSearch=1&url=search-alias%3Daps& field-keywords=harry+potter&Go.x=6&Go.y=15&Go=Go

Way more than I ever want to explore, but I can't help be curious what happens if I clean up everything except the actual search pattern, producing the following shorter URL:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-1882688-6100927?i field-keywords=harry+potter

Ulp. Cut out too much and it doesn't work. Instead, let's work on getting rid of that ugly ref value. This URL does work:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=harry+potter&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

a tiny bit more experimentation and we learn that a slightly shorter URL will work too:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=harry+potter&Go=Go

Now we can reverse engineer the URL and turn it into a form. Everything before the "?" is the action of the form, and everything after is in name=value form, with those pairs separated by an "&" symbol. Tiny additional nuance: the "%3D" in the URL is an encoded "=" symbol, so we'll want to change that back as part of the code writing process. This means that the following should work:

<form method="get" action="http://www.amazon.com/s/">
<input type="hidden" name="url" value="search-alias=aps" />
Search Amazon: <input type="text" name="field-keywords" />
<input type="submit" name="Go" value="Go" />
</form>

Sure enough, it does. Try it here:

   

Search Amazon:

I admit, it's not the prettiest form we could create, but functionality-wise, I hope you can see how as with the other search boxes I've duplicated here, this is more a detective job than an HTML coding job.

Tip: Want to have the search results open in a new window? Add the attribute target="new" to the FORM line.


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Reader Comments To Date: 3

kelly hogg said, on August 10, 2007 3:05 PM:

Thank you for this tutorial, I have made a You Tube and a few other search boxes for my site because of it. some searches are quite difficult but it is a fun challange.

Bryan said, on September 28, 2007 9:39 AM:

What if I want the search to only search a certain keyword, Example "Honda Parts" ?

rugamba jean paul said, on June 1, 2010 11:50 PM:

how can I creat a database in asp and connect it to html;please for any response send it for me at rugamba30@yahoo.fr

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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