Moving on from the success of BuyLatr, I’ve been playing around with other ways to make bargain hunting and online shopping easier. Today I’m launching the beta of “GoogAzon” – an extension for the Flock and Firefox browsers that adds related Amazon search results to the same Google results page.

It starts with an unobtrusive orange bar (yes, I love orange):

And expands into a listing of the top 10 items (complete with Image Preview tooltips):

Planned enhancements include price comparison (showing the lowest prices from Amazon and other sites), support for Yahoo/MSN search results… and whatever else the users ask for. We’re using UserVoice again for feedback, after our great experience on the BuyLatr.com website.

Some of you may note that I’ve stolen the “SpandexFox” brand from myself (previously the name of an expanded ElasticFox extension). I’ve been invited by Amazon to contribute patches to ElasticFox directly, and frankly the name seemed much cooler than a “Dashboard for managing EC2 instances”. This way, it can be all about making your browsing experience… tighter. Oh, and yes – pictures of “Megan Fox” in Spandex are definitely a possibility.

They decided to run a story on my happy little bot this morning. I didn’t know about it, came back from lunch – and I had 100 users. (For the last week, that number has been stubbornly stuck at 8).

I poked a little further, and realized that only 20 of those 100 users had twitter accounts. Hmm – I guess I better get email notifications working, eh?

In the five to six minutes that it took me to whip up an email solution, I added another 15 users. Wow. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know where this traffic was coming from – I hadn’t gotten around to adding google analytics code yet.

tail -f /var/log/httpd/buylater-access.log…

Ah. Lifehacker.

Here’s what happened to my user counts (new users per hour, and per day):

1      12      2008-03-28
20     13     2008-03-28
45     14     2008-03-28
57     15     2008-03-28
35     16     2008-03-28
20     17     2008-03-28
20     18     2008-03-28
22     19     2008-03-28
12     20     2008-03-28
12     21     2008-03-28
12     22     2008-03-28
15     23     2008-03-28
8       0     2008-03-29
7       1     2008-03-29
1       2     2008-03-29
2       3     2008-03-29
3       4     2008-03-29

I have to admit the 57-new-user peak was pretty exciting – nothing like a new user every minute to blow your socks off.

I quickly started having problems, of course – as the user count climbed, so too did the item count – which meant I was hammering Amazon’s API almost continuously. They didn’t like that, and started bouncing some of my replies. Luckily, I found this article that explained how to query up to 10 items per API request, which means I’ve been able to maintain an update interval of less than 3 minutes. (I’ll tune that for the most popular / rapidly changing items soon.)

For about an hour, a bug in my email function (the one I whipped up in the first 5 minutes) caused everyone to receive blank emails (sorry about that one). Oh, and I stopped echoing ALL the item updates to the twitter stream after the first 20 minutes or so.

I tried to jump into the comments on lifehacker, the consumerist.com, and a couple of other blog posts, but since I didn’t have a preapproved account, my comments don’t appear to have shown up. Ah well.

After the first bug report got filed by way of Jesse Andrews (who was kind enough to route it back to me), I threw a form up on the front page of the website to collect this priceless feedback. My favorite so far – apparently the beautiful web2.0 autogenerated logo I was using is “worse than nothing.” I wonder what they would think of my Web 2.0 Merit Badge (which I made for the Twitter Color Wars.)

So there isn’t really any summary statement just yet – tomorrow I’ll be able to start combing through the feedback, see how many of the users “stuck”, and go from there.