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Comment by projectileboy | Hacker News Reader

I work as a developer on the API team at Best Buy, and we're trying to open up our data in ways that will (hopefully) be useful to folks outside of Best Buy. Please feel free to comment on anything you especially like or dislike.

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What's the formula for choosing Top Trending? Is it absolute or relative lift over the previous three hours? Can you disclose any details on the algorithms or the features used in the Similar Products API?

I'd love to talk to you offline. Could you shoot me an email? Details in profile.

On the API team, we're simply packaging data that is cooked up internally by teams who are also providing data for the dot com site, as well as other stuff. Consequently, I can't give you good information (and in any case, I maybe couldn't even if I knew - some of these types of things (like trending, similar products, etc.) are carefully tweaked by business folks, same as at any other retailer. Nothing crazy; but I think the details are proprietary.).

Where did the idea for the API come from? At large companies that like I imagine upper-management sees things like this as a cost center, which can make it difficult to try and innovate.

I believe the original set of APIs (called "Remix") were cooked up by some of the bestbuy.com architecture crew, and lately there's been increased interest and support from the management. The executives here are actually pretty forward-thinking about this kind of stuff.

heres to avoiding bankruptcy! somehow i find myself rooting for the underdog in an internet world.

Best Buy is the leader in the retail market for consumer electronics.

I'm not quite sure I would consider Best Buy an underdog...

You mean Circuit City?

Super stoked to see a public api from your company. First thing I did, though, was try to hit http://api.remix.bestbuy.com/v1/products/1162032.json. Despite being a json file, it returns html. Admittedly, a consumer should be looking at the err code first, but a json formatted error would be preffered :]

keep up the great work!

I'm really sorry about that - there are a few types of errors that come from Mashery for which we haven't yet customized the responses to properly return JSON. Essentially what you're seeing is that you aren't specifying an API key. To use the Best Buy APIs, you just need to register for a key at https://remix.mashery.com/member/register. And there's more info on getting started at https://developer.bestbuy.com/get-started. If you decide to try it out, please let me know if you run into any problems.

Why did you guys decide to have the API endpoints a) use plain HTTP and b) include the API key as a query parameter? While it doesn't look like the API lets you access anything particularly sensitive, you're just asking for API keys to be sniffed out and used/abused by folks other than those you issued the key for.

It's a fair complaint. I'm not sure when we're getting everything to HTTPS, but I know it's on the roadmap. Including the API key as a parameter goes back to the early days of our API - quite a few years ago. The problem now is that we have enough apps with enough traffic that we can't just move it to the header without causing a bit of disruption. But that too is on our roadmap. Both issues are important.

It should still be fairly easy to check for an API Key in the header if not found in the request parameters. This way there would be no disruption for old apps, and it would benefit new apps.

I also think that both this and HTTPS are mandatory, but since it's on your roadmap that's good enough.

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