During his written responses to questions from the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt identified a range of competitors that Google faces in the market today. Some were well-known and some more obscure. One of the smaller companies that Schmidt mentioned was FindTheBest. He identified the company in a list of "vertical search" providers: We do not have to speculate as to whether there are new entrants in vertical search services such as comparison shopping and local search and review sites. There are new entrants in these market segments all the [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines | Top News

While Black Friday may be famous for kicking off the holiday shopping season and attracting flocks of consumers to brick-and-mortar retailers, Cyber Monday has certainly made its presence known in the online shopping community. Just last year, Cyber Monday online sales increased 19.4%, pushing the average order value up from $180.03 in 2009 to $194.89 in 2010, according to an IBM Coremetrics report. This year, many retailers are anticipating an even higher increase in sales. So, for all of us looking to make the most out of this opportunity, it is time (or never too late) to start prepar [...]

Related Topics: In House Search Marketing | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Way back in 2002 Google launched catalog search. It was ultimately shut down in April, 2009. The product allowed users to browse popular mail-order catalogs or search across catalogs for specific products. In many ways it was crude yet cool and useful. I liked it but it wasn't enough of a traffic driver to justify its continued existence at a time when Google was shuttering under-performing products. Now shopping engine TheFind has created an updated but similar product for the iPad and Android tablets: TheFind Catalogue. Taking advantage of the magazine-like format of the iPad it [...]

Related Topics: Google: Product Search | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

For those who follow search it was initially one of those "WTF moments": Walmart acquiring erstwhile Google challenger Kosmix. However AllThingsD reports that the price was $300 million-plus vs. $55 million raised. So the founders and investors get a seemingly nice exit. Kosmix will now become part of the newly established "@WalmartLabs." When it launched in 2006 Kosmix was building a better search engine that organized results by category and added numerous filters allowing users to drill down for more relevance and control. Below is an early Kosmix search results page (via DailyTech [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Health & Medical Search Engines | Search Engines: News Search Engines | Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Search Engines: Personalized Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Optimizing for search engines and shopping engines is all about accessibility, relevance and authority. In the process of continuously optimizing for search and searchers, sometimes basic areas get ignored, overwritten or overdone leading to entire sections of the site being blocked, duplicated or rendered useless for search engines. Here are ten quick checks to ensure your site has not stumbled into the no or low visibility zone.   1.  Check robots.txt on every sub-domain Are you blocking sections of your site in the robots.txt file? If so, check to make sure that you are no [...]

Related Topics: Search & Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines