This is a new extension for GNOME Shell from Alan Bell that adds an Amazon Store search provider to Shell Overview through a proxy, and display the results, kinda similar to Unity.
Although I might not going to use that, it looks totally cool because you can set some awesome options, like the organization you want to affiliate for your Amazon purchase!
Shopping Search Provider Extension
The extension works really simple. After the one click install from extensions.gnome.org you open the Shell Search and you type the “a” prefix for Amazon, and then your search keyword.
Lego Example
Linux Programming Example
Obviously when you click on an item Amazon open through your browser so you can shop. And not all results is possible to be visible here as the regular site.
Options
Lets have a look at the first 4 options because are bit tricky.
Keyword
This sets the prefix for enabling the Amazon Search in Shell. A weakness of GNOME Shell to don’t support prefixes out of box, but anyway this is another story. The default here is “a”. A better choice would be to change that to “a:” or even “amazon:”, so you can understand is a prefix, since I guess more and more such search providers will arrive.
Backend
This is the juice stuff! Backend is a Proxy Server that retrieve your queries and the Amazon Results. At the moment you only have one choice, http://products.libertus.co.uk. Should you trust this server, since isn’t a well known service? Is totally up to you! It is kinda a matter of privacy (you expose your searches) but not really a security concern. On the other hand privacy and security walk together.
Since Client is Open Source any established and trusted organization can make a proxy, so we will feel a bit safer. Well, I don’t want to expand on this one, you all know the risks ;)
Shop Domain
What else? You just choose the Amazon Store of your preference and of your location. Available options here are:
Available Stores: {co.uk, de, com, ca, fr, co.jp, it, cn, es}
Different Amazon Stores give different results and prices.
Affiliate
This is really cool, because *you* can set your affiliate service and give some revenues from your purchase to your favorite organization. The default gives a commission to the author but you can change that if you want. For example, if you want to “donate” to GNOME you can use:
gnomestore-20
Affiliates in Amazon are called Amazon Associates and you can find many more organizations there. To construct an affiliating link for Amazon is really simply and you add something like:
tag=gnomestore-20
but since none do this, is really cool that author provide this text field. If you navigate away to another product (from this you opened) affiliating stop to run.
The rest of the options are easy understandable.
Specs
This extension is only available for GNOME 3.6
{
"description": "Purchase things from Amazon online stores",
"name": "Shopping Search Provider",
"settings-schema": "org.gnome.shell.extensions.shopping-search-provider",
"shell-version": [
"3.6.2"
],
"url": "",
"uuid": "shopping@libertus.co.uk",
"version": 2
}
Download
Before you use this, I strongly reckon to read: http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2012/12/shopping-lens-for-gnome-shell/
Get it @https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/564/amazon-shopping/
Fork it @https://github.com/AlanBell/shopping-search-provider
Happy Shopping ;)