Smarter’s video product reviews are a very entertaining and useful product research tool. As Smarter’s product evangelist Paul Willmes said, “the reviews are by people who actually own [the product] which makes it more real. It makes the opinion more valuable, like a friend giving you advice.”

The question of ‘what to buy’ or ‘what not to buy’ has long been addressed (poorly in my opinion) by the shopping engines through a myriad of buyer’s guides, reviews, and user ratings. These resources are sprinkled throughout the shopping engines, but have never been a main focus as the shopping search engines have historically tried to get people to click out as soon as possible so they can make money (through CPC fees).

Smarter.com’s video product reviews, however, are tightly integrated into the product shopping and browsing experience. You can’t miss them, and for the most part you wouldn’t want to. Right now, there are approximately 24,000 video product reviews on the site which are being syndicated from Expo TV (only the top reviews from Expo TV show up on Smarter).

You can view reviews throughout all levels of the shopping search experience, from the product list level to the product detail level.

It’ll be interesting to see what impact these video product reviews have on merchant click-through and conversion rate.

The vertical search results on the main shopping engines should not be ignored. We’re all very familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but you can also get to the top of Google through Google Base. I estimate that over 30,000 merchants are taking advantage of Google Base, but only a very small percentage have actually done anything to improve their results on Google Base.

Over at SingleFeed, I discuss the concept of Data Feed Optimization (DFO) to help submitters get listed higher on Google Base and therefore have the opportunity to show up as a Google OneBox result, above Google’s organic listings.

Here’s a summary of the post entitled Google Base & Data Feed Optimization – How to Succeed on Google Base: -Google Base is for almost anything. You can submit products (which I focus on), job listings, housing listings, recipes, blog posts, personal ads, and more. The information I present here is aimed at product submissions, but applicable to many types of data submission.

-Most product submissions happen through an automated program that only submits the bare minimum requirements. This usually results in mediocre traffic to those listings. Google Base Store Connector and automated XML feed submissions through major ecommerce platforms remind me of the Submit It service of the early Web 1.0 days. Submit It would submit a URL to hundreds of directories/engines for a small fee, but in my opinion, it didn’t matter if your URL was submitted if the page wasn’t search engine friendly. The same thing goes with data feed submission. Submitting a data feed is just one step. Google Base Store Connector and automated XML solutions do their job in getting data submitted, but merchants must optimize the data feed to get significant results.

-Introduction to Google Base Custom Attributes. Google Base has over 80 pre-defined optional product attributes, but will never be the expert in any particular product category, so Google Base allow users to submit Custom Attributes. With this extra information, searchers will have a better idea of what the merchant sells and therefore the merchant has a better chance of attracting targeted visitors and converting those visitors into buyers. For example, a ski retailer might add a custom attribute for ’ski length’ because it’s a critical attribute for a consumer making a ski buying decision. A energy bar retailer might add a custom attribute for ‘ingredients’ because it’s a critical attribute for people with allergies.

-When does Google Base matter? No one currently goes directly to base.google.com, although millions do go to Froogle which is made up of Google Base product listings. Hundreds of millions more go directly to Google and are sometimes exposed to OneBox product results, which are populated through Froogle (via Google Base). I think OneBox results will get a lot more prominent throughout Google this year. However, Google isn’t going to display just any Google Base listings in that prized OneBox area. The OneBox listings will be reserved for information that is more relevant than anything else on the search engine result page (SERP). Relevance means a lot of things to a lot of people/engines, but Google has already made it clear that the more information you provide to Base, the better your results will be. If a merchant spends time optimizing a feed and adds Custom Attributes, then the data could be more relevant than anything else Google has in its index.

Since I’ve been absent a while (sorry Danny, Chris, and Barry), thought I should first catch everyone up on management changes at the shopping comparison engines.

Here’s the rundown:

• Shopzilla: President John Phelps and Chief Product Officer Farhad Mohit have left the company. COO Bill Glass has taken over as president. Here’s the press release.
• Shopping.com: CMO Mike Aufricht, VP Internet Marketing & Business Intelligence Rob Goldman, CTO and Co-Founder Amir Ashkenazi, and Vice President, Global Operations and U.S. Merchant Operations Deana Bergquist have left the company. Here’s a look at the new management team.
• PriceGrabber: President & Co-Founder Kamran Pourzanjani has left the company (although he’s still around as an adviser for Experian). COO, Ron LaPierre has taken over as president.
• Become: Founder, Chairman & CTO Yeogirl Yun has left the company. Further re-organization details will be announced in the coming weeks. Joe Kubiniec, a 17-year veteran of Microsoft, has joined as Director of User Experience.

So what does this mean for these companies? Truthfully, I think it’s business as usual. Shopzilla, Shopping.com, and PriceGrabber were all purchased by larger entities (EW Scripps, eBay, and Experian Interactive, respectively) in mid-late 2005 and it’s normal for founders and senior management to move on. While I’m disappointed to see many of these people leave, I think it’s a healthy change for each company as new management comes with new ideas which can help move the industry, and these top players, forward.

I’ve heard a number of people play up the softness in Shopzilla’s expected earnings as the main reason for Phelps’ and Mohit’s departures, but I think that’s only a small piece of the puzzle.

As for Become, the company has re-focused efforts on the comparison shopping side of the business, reducing staff in areas such as marketing and strengthening staff in areas like account management.

SideStep today announced that it raised $15 million in its Series C round, led by Norwest Venture Partners. Other VCs involved include Trident Capital, Leader Ventures and Saints Capital. To date, SideStep has raised aproximately $32 million. Competitor Kayak has raised $30 million.

Norwest is an investor in Turn (the new CPA ad network), which is led by Jim Barnett. Jim Barnett sits on the board of SideStep. Small world. Also, Norwest is an investor in Yatra, an India based travel search engine, so they know something about the space.

So what does the profitable travel search company need the money for? According to the press release, “SideStep will use the funding to aggressively scale key areas of the business, while growing its leadership position in vertical search and building out its media and user-generated content offerings.”

Since I’m not one for canned answers, I talked to Rob Solomon, CEO of SideStep about his plans. Seems like SideStep has its eye on more acquisitions after its deal with Sam Shank and Travelpost. Rob said “the investment creates new opportunities for us. Before, we didn’t have the valuation or cash to buy. We’ve more than doubled the value of the company.”

Besides acquisitions, SideStep will also invest in international expansion and platforms related to travel planning.

Travel search engine Farecast officially launched its Fare Guard service, protecting flyers from volatile airfare prices. The service allows travelers to basically purchase an insurance policy on a flight for $10 ($3 until February 1), thus locking in the published rate.

Fare Guard is available for about half of Farecast’s listed flights according to Bob Tedeschi’s NYTimes article.

So how can Farecast offer this service while even airlines can’t predict their own fares? Farecast tracks over a hundred pricing indicators to give travelers an idea of when to book to get the best price (here’s an introduction to the service). Next to each airfare displayed on Farecast is a prediction of whether the price of the flight will rise or fall in the next 7 days, along with a confidence level for that prediction. The more confident Farecast is, the more likely you’ll see Fare Guard available.

Rounding out its travel search offerings, SideStep will soon launch cruise search, powered by CruisesOnly, the premier cruise brand of Boston-based NLG. While I was surprised by this announcement as I think SideStep has a lot of other fish in the frying pan it needs to focus on, Jon Robison explained that “CruisesOnly is a full service solution for us. We are leveraging a partner. It’s light weight integration and doesn’t distract us from Air, Car, and Hotel.”

The question for SideStep and all the other vertical search players is still how to gain loyalty in a world in which everyone (ok, not everyone, but you get the picture) starts their search at Google or Yahoo. How does SideStep or Kayak gain loyalty and reduce dependence on the PPC engines? Is it by offering a one stop shop, complete with cruise search? Sure, that’s part of it and the cruise market is nothing to sneeze about (aprx. $13B according to PhoCusWright), but I’m much more excited about the company’s distribution partnerships content generation (user generated, expert editorial) plans

SideStep announced a deal with Orange, one of the UK’s leading portals, a couple weeks ago. As opposed to the wasteful Amazon deal which was rumored to have cost SideStep a pretty penny (or 100m pretty pennies), this deal was set up with a much more reasonable up front fee plus a revenue share on ad sales and bookings. This will be the model for SideStep going forward. In this hot ad market, there are plenty of publishers looking for more inventory and a deal with SideStep provides just that.

And then there’s TravelPost and hopefully other similar user generated content (UGC) initiatives. While SideStep is very happy sending travelers off to partner sites to book, SideStep definitely has ambitions to become a destination. By aggregating expert editorial content and user generated content, SideStep is heading in the right direction. This content at its core is meant to provide color to a potential traveler’s itinerary and to gently push a person to book, but in the meantime, SideStep has no qualms with racking up the page views and charging high CPM advertising dollars from big brand advertisers who want to reach a targeted audience. I expect SideStep to add hundreds of these type of pages, enhanced with TravelPost content, over the next year. The more UGC it develops, the more pages there are for the search engines to crawl.

Ok, but everyone understands this. So why does a vertical search engine like SideStep excite me? Because the GDSs lost their battle with the airlines this past year and the industry hit a tipping point in early 2006 when travel search engines gained clear acceptance from the travel providers as just another way to efficiently distribute content. The travel search engines now have to figure out how to go from aprx. 4m uniques/month (SideStep, Kayak) to 10m uniques/month. You’re seeing the foundation for that with these portal deals (similar to what helped PriceGrabber become a top shopping comparison engine) and content aggregation plays (I would love to see Sam Shank blow out TravelPost, head up additional content acquisitions, and create a network of SideStep travel blogs, vlogs, and of course, a travel wiki).

Yahoo! Shortcuts must be working for searchers and for Yahoo!

Starting last week, I noticed Yahoo prompting me a lot more to search for retailer coupons, flights from city to city and movie showtimes – all which trigger a Yahoo Shortcut. While shortcuts have been around for a while, this is the first time I remember Yahoo prompting me over and over use them before I’ve completed a search.

I’ve gotten used to getting this after a generic search:

But these showed up when I went to search.yahoo.com or my.yahoo.com:

If you want to learn more about these vertical search results creeping into the main results, check out the series I wrote for SearchDay: Yahoo! Shortcuts, Google OneBox, Microsoft Instant Answers, and Ask Smart Answers.