Updated
If you’re searching to buy a product online, there’s no single “branded” engine that stands out — and for a reason. All of the major shopping engines sites have sold out to advertisers.
This may represent a grand opportunity: If a Google-like search engine emerges in shopping, perceived to be without bias, it could be hugely popular. It could “become the ubiquitous brand,” said Dan Ciporin, the former CEO of Shopping.com, calling this a “missed opportunity.” Ciporin left Shopping.com when it was acquired by eBay in 2005, and this week joined a venture firm Canaan Partners in its Westport, Connecticut office.
However, its unclear to us whether there ever will be a singularly popular shopping engine. There are too many ways to shop.
Here’s the background: Leaders like Shopping.com (owned by eBay), Shopzilla (owned by Scripps) and Pricegrabber (bought by Experian), and independents Become, Nextag and others all feature results that are paid for by vendors — so you’re never really sure why a particular product or vendor is ranked high or low. Many of them even buy search traffic by placing ads on Google and Yahoo. The sector is in malaise, experiencing a wave of management defections — even as a host of new companies are springing up to pick off niches. Retrevo and others are targeting consumer electronics. Ugenie focuses on books, and Like.com specializes in fashion, jewelry and textiles. Reflecting the fragmented state of shopping search, new sites like Roboshopper are aggregating results — just like the “meta” search engines that showed up several years ago to aggregate Google, Yahoo and Ask. But like those, Roboshopper’s site doesn’t really add much.
Even Google’s search engine, Froogle, has veered from purity. It forces vendors to submit “feeds” to its engine, effectively forcing out the small retailers who don’t want or know how to. Many brand names like Amazon.com and Williams-Sonoma aren’t represented.
Thefind, a Mountain View start-up, says its approach — of providing only unpaid results — is paying off. It crawls large portions of the Web, and returns results based on its relevance criteria. It has built its own equivalent of Google’s “Pagerank,” but for shopping, counting incoming links to a particular product as a sign of relevance, and accounting for things like how frequently it shows up at popular retail outlets. Thefind says it will hit a million visits next month, after only six months. It has some work to go in making consumers appreciate its benefits (relevance is difficult to showcase in shopping search, and semantics can be tricky; type in “dress shirt” at Thefind, and women’s clothing make up the top two results, with only the third result getting you to a men’s dress shirt from Jos A. Bank), but it looks to be on the right track. Thefind may be one to watch. It is raising its next round of capital.
[Update: See our update on Thefind, where we have revised our opinion on the company. Its results aren't as clean as we thought.]
Still, despite such efforts, peoples’ interests, motivations and tastes range so greatly, the concept of “relevance” may be more fleeting in shopping than it is in regular search. We’re more uncertain than ever there will be a single category killer in shopping search.
12 Comments
-
SFGary said:
Looks like ugenio is history? at least according to the link…the domain name is for sale
-
jenn said:
the link to ugenio takes you to a domain page showcasing wine related things. which is too bad, because i was really excited about a book-buying search engine…
-
William Krings said:
Is the time NOW for relevancy in marketing real estate? I am curious. What would it take for INVIRO to go public?
http://www.inviro.com
Please check the INVIRO concept for real estate franchising and forward any advice you may have.Thanks,
William Krings INVIRO -
Tom said:
I actually liked the RoboShopper site. I’ve always found that I need to use more than one shopping site, so maybe their strategy does make sense here more than for search. RoboShopper does save time, and I think I’ll use it regularly.
-
Wild Zoo said:
“Many of them even buy search traffic by placing ads on Google and Yahoo.”
Um, yes, along with eBay, Amazon, and the rest of the ecommerce universe. Why is buying traffic particularly nefarious?
SFGARY and JENN, I think the company you’re looking for is Ugenie, the domain of which is not for sale.
-
Jammer said:
Wild Zoo you’re making a lot of sense. Even corrected our dimwitted commentator matt marshall (Ugenie). Do they call you wild zoo for your prowess in bed?
call me XOXO
-
Phil Butler said:
Great article! I am with you on the credibility band wagon. If anyone could gain steady online respect they would rule the shopping venue.
I expect this is true for all the other sectors too. The water is so muddy in Web 2.0 right now I am wondering if any of us will know which way is up in a year?
Thanks for the info, Phil
-
John said:
Re the example of “dress shirt” try this product search:
Search for dress shirt on styleray.comYou can then refine it by clicking the “men” option.
Built with goole co-op search in about 10 minutes.
-
Matt Marshall said:
Thanks XOXO, I’ve corrected reference to Ugenie.
-
Theo Tonca said:
I don’t know if there ever will be a dominant shopping engine simply because too many people are making too much off of affiliate links to care. But i do know that there will be a relevant local shopping engine because my startup is building it. (shameless self plug ;)
-
JJ said:
You can try Pricescan.com for books - pretty comprehensive, and you can search by ISBN, author, title…
-
Matt Marshall said:
Btw, I updated this story yesterday with a link to a follow-up story about Thefind, which looks at issues that came to light after publishing this.
-
Sumitra Menon said:
Hi,
i am a regular reader of http://www.sramanamitra.com. There is an interesting discussion with Siva Kumar which you may want to read: http://sramanamitra.com/2007/04/03/thefind-lifestyle-shopping-part-1/
