VentureBeat

TheFind, a comparison shopping search engine, has bought a smaller startup called Glimpse, a shopping site targeting women, for an undisclosed amount.

Mountain View-based TheFind, which launched last fall, is trying to deliver better shopping search results to users, featuring the items they most want to buy.

Nextag, Shopzilla and other shopping search engines are already big in this space. But as we’ve noted, TheFind stands out because it is growing and because it doesn’t ask merchants to pay it for top search results. The Find will be Glimpse’s search engine, allowing the latter site to focus on being an online shopping destination.

TheFind just received another $15 million in funding a few weeks ago, from Bain Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

Glimpse launched in April, with an undisclosed amount of funding from Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

TheFind is a comparison shopping search engine that is unusually clean — it doesn’t ask merchants to pay for their products to show up in results. TheFind’s traffic is growing.

This purity is one reason it has just won $15 million in fresh backing from big-name investors Bain Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The investment, to be announced tomorrow (Thursday) makes TheFind one of the best-funded of the new shopping search engines. It wants to do to shopping what Google did to general search seven years ago — turn it upside-down by making results as relevant as possible to the user. Search for “Victoria Secret” for example, and TheFind will return plenty of results listing clothing made by that company. If you do that at Shopping.com, you’ll get nothing, because Victoria Secret refuses to pay it.

Shopping.com and a wave of other early players have matured and seen financial success — and yet all of them demand payment from retailers in return for showing their wares. With so many players, you’d think the game would be over: Nextag, Pricegrabber and Shopzilla.com — all are huge. Most recently, Nextag recently received a major investment that valued it at $1.2 billion. A slew of other start-ups, from Retrevo to Become.com, have launched too — but none of the smaller players have gotten major traction. None have received major amounts of funding.

Thefind seeks to crawl as much of the Web as possible to search for hard goods (electronics, cameras, etc) as well as soft goods (furniture, clothing, etc).

We should note that after our initial favorable review of TheFind back in March, we made several qualifications a week later when we came to realize that TheFind was not as pure as were initially led to believe. These were largely temporary issues. At the time, TheFind’s sponsored ads at the top of returned results were not clearly marked as such. TheFind has since marked its sponsored results clearly as “sponsored”. In addition, TheFind was paying for ads at search engines to attract traffic to its site, in an effort to market itself. So while it boasted a million unique users, we discovered that half of those users were directed there by an ad (suggesting its growth wasn’t as self-fueled as we’d believed). However, TheFind has since reduced its payments for such traffic. This month, 80 percent of its two million unique monthly users this month are be people going directly to the site, said chief executive Siva Kumar.

TheFind.com says it indexes 170 million products and 500,000 stores.

Here’s the latest (updated) action:

Geomas says it has location-based search patent — The London based company says its patent is being infringed upon by some 20 large internet players, and this probably includes Google and Yahoo. Here’s a description of the patent. The company says it raising $20 million to help it extract licensing deals. It started by suing Verizon. (Via Techdirt).

KyteTV gets investment from Nokia — See our story here.

IPO market sees strongest month since 2004, but not for buyout firms - Eleven venture-backed companies raised $1.6 billion through initial
public offerings (IPOs) on US exchanges in May, higher than any other month since Oct. 2004, according to data from Thomson Financial and the VC lobby, NVCA. However, IPOs of companies backed by buyout firms have actually declined, raising questions about whether the bubbly investment activity in that sector is sustainable.

A PayPal-only search engine — TheFind, a shopping search engine launched paypal.thefind.com, a new shopping search engine built solely for browsing products from merchants who accept PayPal payments.

Google’s privacy upgraded — Google said it will keep the Web search histories of users for only 18 months instead of 24, responding to pressure from EU authorities. See story here. Meanwhile, search engine expert Danny Sullivan discovers Google is considering creating a dashboard (scroll to near bottom) where people can decide what aspects of their search and surf behavior Google can access.

Google opens the veil for advertisers — Google released its Placement Performance Report, which enables AdWords advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. It also provides “site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites.”

Google powers search on Sina — Google will place its search box on the Website of Sina, China’s third largest site in terms of traffic. Marketwatch reports here. In return, Sina gets a share the search advertising revenues Google collects. This is the latest move by Google to try to catch Baidu, China’s leading search engine.

Technorati’s mysterious traffic surge — Techcrunch has details on why the traffic surge may be somewhat misleading.

[Updated: YouTube's video-music filtering technology not reliant on Audible Magic -- Google's video property YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co. It will be built by Google's own engineers, and not be solely reliant on Audible Magic, as we'd previously believed after this report. Audible Magic has had filtering problems, as earlier reported. It turns out, Audible Magic is being used for music filtering only; see Elise Ackerman's follow-up today,who also points to an agenda by Google to use the copyright controversy to build up a massive database of videos.]

Former Engadget editor Pete Rojas to form company focused on ad-driven music label — He teams up with Downtown Records to launch a new music label, dubbed RCRD LBL, that will offer the music of artists for free, but paid for with ads. See story here.

Quzhai latest foreign clone — Quzhai is a clone of StumbleUpon, with a little Digg thrown in. Notice how most clones seem to originate in Germany and China, somewhat understandable since they have two of the largest domestic non-English internet markets. Quzhai raised RMB 1 million seed funding from BV Capital.

Biomass it steaming hot — Bull Moose Energy gets $60 million for project in San Diego and other cities. See our story here.

Thefind is cleaner than most comparison shopping engines, we wrote last week, because it doesn’t ask merchants to pay for their products to show up in Thefind’s results.

However, Thefind is not as clean as we were led to believe.

In conversations over the past two weeks, the Mountain View company told VentureBeat that its rising traffic (the company says it will soon hit a million unique visitors) stems from an appreciation of the supposed clean results. Turns out, Thefind is buying some of its traffic with ads on Google. Some of its competitors pointed this out, once we’d published our story. When confronted, chief executive Siva Kumar said he is buying traffic to introduce users to new offerings. There’s nothing sinister about this, because all sites do it. It’s just that Thefind’s story of growth is less compelling that we’d realized. Kumar now says more than 500,000 unique visitors came to the site organically, which is still growth, but not as strong as we thought.

Moreover, Thefind blurs the line between ads and natural results even more than other sites. In the example of a search for “dress shirts” we mentioned in our first story, the two top results were sponsored ads, not natural results — and there was nothing clearly demarcating them. (Indeed, that’s why they stood out so much; they were ads for women’s clothing, which is odd, given that the search was for “dress shirts). Shopping.com, by comparison, shows the ads with a different shade of color in the background. We asked Kumar about this, and he agreed that this was misleading, and apparently has since changed this (we no longer see the women’s clothing).

Finally, many top results come from feeds from merchants with an affiliate program, suggesting Thefind is getting paid for some of its results on a click-per-action basis. Kumar responds as follows:

…We need to have feeds for some of the categories that are fast changing in nature (electronics is a case where prices change daily). As a new site on the market we cannot get direct feeds from the merchants themselves that easily • we have to first prove ourselves first. Therefore if we wanted comprehensiveness and accuracy we need to get these feeds through the only available channel to small companies for these feeds • affiliate network suppliers. Hence some of these items do have the affiliate codes on them. We are actively in the process of contacting the merchants directly now that we have the traffic and we will be able to replace these affiliate feeds with the merchant data.

Again, there is nothing wrong with this. Other shopping comparison sites, such as Become.com, started out this way, too — moving from affiliate programs to normal feeds. It’s just that we originally suggested that Thefind was based purely on its own crawl of the Web and relevance. That’s not true.

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.