September 12, 2003

If we are to believe some experts, shopping will be the arena for the next search engine war. That is probably a slight exaggeration.

Nevertheless, surfers seems to be loosing some of their inhibitions as regards online shopping (giving away credit card information and all that), so a well established shopping search engine may bring in quite a lot of money through advertising and paid listings. Yahoo! is testing out a new shopping search engine at products.yahoo.com. It is different from the old Yahoo! shopping section more or less in the same way as a directory edited by humans is different from a search engine that gathers results automatically.

The dividing line is a bit blurred though, as shopping search engines often rely on automatic XML or spreadsheet feeds from merchants, as do comparison shopping directories. However, as Yahoo! puts it "The Yahoo! Product Search engine also crawls the web pages of other, non-affiliated merchants to include their relevant products..." In any case, the way it presents results makes it look more like a search engine. Google's Froogle shopping search engine also offer a mix of product information submitted by merchants and information gathered by Google's search engine spiders.

Google has recently made some small changes to Froogle, which is still in its beta test phase. They have added a left hand column giving the user access to forms and links that lets him or her sort listings according to price and gain access to the relevant directory category. European Kelkoo has now presented a new revised version of its new search engine. This is actually also a test version, but Kelkoo is nevertheless using the new search engine by default at its UK site.

The entry page has become a little more complex than in the previous version, as it now includes a directory structure and a few selected products. The search function is just as easy as in Froogle! and Yahoo!, however. Enter your product and Kelkoo makes a good guess at what you are looking for. The search result pages includes a pull down menu that let you narrow your search to a relevant category.

The winner of this race will be the company that offers an easy to understand interface and highly relevant results. And so far both Kelkoo, Yahoo! and Froogle is counting on simplicity.

Source: Pandia

        

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