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 time. A new comparison shopping site, FindTheBest, launched by the co-founder of DoubleClick last year, just raised $6 million in venture funding over the summer.

FindTheBest, call it a “decision engine” or “comparison engine” if you like, allows users to see detailed, side-by-side information about an increasing range of things from financial advisors and colleges to smartphones and ski vacation spots. It’s what Google aspired to create on an automated basis with Google Squared but was unable to do.

Today the site has introduced a much improved redesign and user interface that makes it considerably more usable than it was before. The site had great data in the past but was too cluttered and complex to use. Now the streamlined interface will enable it to attract many more users and much more mainstream attention.

FindTheBest has an algorithm that mashes up user and expert ratings on products, services and institutions. It’s a kind of next-generation consumer reports. Currently the company monetizes with display ads at the margins of its pages. But it’s likely to be acquired before it needs to truly worry about monetization, given all the data and content that it’s compiling.

The company previously raised $6 million in VC funding, as Eric Schmidt mentioned in his Senate testimony.

Related Entries

• DoubleClick Founder Launches Structured “Decision Engine” FindTheBest.com
• “Anti-Search Engine” FindTheBest Adds Buying Guides, Top 10 Slideshows
• Google Squared, News Timeline Get Added To Google’s Chopping Block
• Google Buys Metaweb To Bolster Answers, Google Squared & Rich Snippets
• Google Squared Is Now Live

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 preparing.

My advice to you: get your products listed on e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, if you haven’t already.

As many of you know, Amazon is arguably the most popular e-commerce site in the world. Thus, it provides the perfect platform for retailers to place their products in front of tens of millions users.

However, like all good things, Amazon has its drawbacks.

For instance, Amazon’s high user level means an even higher level of competition amongst its sellers. Simply uploading your inventory onto Amazon’s catalog will not give you the results you are looking for.

Instead, your products will never get seen and you will not achieve an increase in sales. For the best results, you must learn how to fully optimize your product listings for Amazon.com.

Here are some of the optimization practices that I have found to be most beneficial to improving performance on Amazon.

Get Reviews

Amazon.com has a strange (and at times, frustrating) algorithm, in which customer reviews seem to play a large role. Products with reviews add credibility to the seller and are often placed higher up on Amazon’s search page, meaning more exposure.

Encourage customer reviews by reaching out to consistent and recent consumers. Politely ask them to post a review about the product on Amazon.com – what they liked about it, how it worked, would they purchase it again, etc.

Create Parent/Child Relationships

Another drawback to Amazon.com is that the catalog is flooded with sellers who create separate product detail pages for products that are essentially the same – differing only by size or color. Some sellers believe that creating separate product detail pages for related products will increase their visibility. However, in my opinion, it greatly deters from the user experience.

Customers do not want to sort through ten different detail pages of the same product in order to find the size or color they are looking for. I recommend making parent/child relationships between products (Amazon provides detailed instructions on how to do this).

These relationships allow related products to be grouped together on a single detail page. This helps reduce the number of search results and helps customers more easily view and compare the different sizing and color options that are available for a product – creating a much friendlier user experience.

Here is an example of an EmpireCovers.com item listed with a parent/child relationship on Amazon:

As you can see, our v-hull boat covers come in a variety of sizes and styles. Opposed to having a listing for the Premium V-Hull Boat Cover: Size 12’ to 14’ Long, 5.6’ Wide and a separate listing for the Standard V-Hull Boat Cover: 17’ to 19’ Long, 8.5’ Wide, all of our v-hull covers are listed on the same detail page, with varying size and style options.

As a result, the consumer can choose a premium, standard or deluxe style cover and can choose these covers in the proper size that is needed to fit the boat.

Choose Strong, Relevant Keywords

Amazon’s search relevancy is based on the information that is provided in product feeds, specifically in the Search Terms, Title, Brand, Manufacturer, MPN, and UPC fields.

In the Search Terms fields, sellers are given the opportunity to provide 5 key terms or phrases. More often than not, sellers choose words that already appear in their Title, Brand and Manufacturer fields. This is not necessary. Amazon’s system automatically includes Title, Brand and Manufacturer when determining search relevancy.

Instead, come up with new and inventive words that relate to the product at hand.

If you are struggling to come up with search terms, contact Amazon Seller Support and ask for suggestions. Or, if your company has a Google Adwords account, use the Keyword Tool to see what the most commonly searched words are for your product. You can then apply these words or phrases to your Amazon search terms – this practice is based on the notion that Amazon’s search pattern will likely be the same or similar to Google’s.

Include Rich Product Descriptions

This should speak for itself. Today, online consumers are much more tech savvy and detail oriented. If a consumer is not given an accurate and detailed description of what they are purchasing, they will not buy it. Make sure your descriptions are clear, accurate and typo free.

Be Prepared For Competitive Pricing

If you are not willing to lower pricing on Amazon.com by at least 10%, then you are probably using the wrong e-commerce site. Amazon.com users are bargain hungry, looking for the best products for the lowest prices.

Getting marked as a low price seller (a.k.a getting that beautiful green check next to your price listings on your inventory page) typically means getting more exposure on the Amazon search page.

Another important aspect of achieving selling success on Amazon is to strive to win the buy box.

A seller must compete for the buy box when he or she is selling a product that is already listed on the Amazon catalog – again, this is because Amazon does not want to flood the catalog with numerous detail pages of the same products.

The seller who offers the product for the lowest price will generally win the buy box and will thus, win the sale. However, this can mean being forced to cut your prices by 20% or more.

I suggest monitoring your Buy Box % on a day-to-day basis via your Amazon business report, located under the “Report Tab” on your merchant account home page.

Make Use Of The Amazon Selling Coach

Finally, all Amazon pro-merchant sellers are given access to the Amazon Selling Coach.

Here, sellers are given tips on how to best maximize their performance. These tips are targeted specifically for the individual seller and are displayed in the order that Amazon feels will be most helpful.

The Selling Coach will point out missing product images, product descriptions and features and other critical information. This is a great way to make sure that none of the products in your inventory are incomplete or lacking.

Amazon’s Seller Central also has great Seller Forums which include a seller support blog, discussions and success stories. I highly suggest reading these in order to maximize your seller performance.

Although we are still relatively new to the Amazon market, I hope that you have found our tips to be both helpful and practical. With Cyber Monday and the holiday season right around corner, it is crucial to get your products listed on as many e-commerce sites as possible and I believe that Amazon is a great place to start.

Special thanks to Claire Salmons, an employee at Empirecovers.com who works on product feeds and Amazon, who helped write and research the article.

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 similarly allows users to browse specific catalogs and search across all available inventory for particular products. The app also allows users to customize a “my catalogue” area as well as save any single item or store catalog to the personal dashboard.

It’s not unlike Amazon’s tablet app WindowShop, which allows for similar browse/search shopping. However TheFind presents a wider array of products from branded retailers. Catalogue is very well suited to the “lean back” tablet experience. There were a few glitches and performance issues for me but overall it’s a very well-designed app.

Late last year Google launched Boutiques.com and I was wondering when the company would launch a Boutiques iPad app and, viola, I discovered today that in fact they had.

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):

When it became clear that Kosmix wasn’t viable as a general purpose search engine the company shifted its model — multiple times. The company evolved into a vertical search engine and then into a collection of structured content pages or homepages for topics.

Behind it all was a massive taxonomy (not unlike Pandora) that made connections between places, things, entities and products. Kosmix used its technology to assemble multimedia rich Wikipedia-like “topic pages”  for different queries or subjects. Below is an example for Las Vegas:

These local pages could have beaten Google Places to the punch but the company didn’t make a promised major push into local. Instead it found great success with a vertical site, RightHealth, which the founders say is “one of the top three health and medical information sites by global reach.”

The company also built personalized news service “MeeHive,” which was a bit ahead of its time and ultimately discontinued. Using the same technology Kosmix later created TweetBeat, “a real-time social media filter.”

Clearly the Kosmix technology is versatile and the founders creative. Walmart will use the technology (and founders) to develop social and mobile applications. Here’s what Walmart said in its release announcing the acquisition:

“We are expanding our capabilities in today’s rapidly growing social commerce environment,” said Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman. “Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores. We are excited to have the Kosmix team join us to accelerate the development of our social and mobile commerce offerings.”

Here’s Kosmix co-founder Anand Rajaraman discussing how Kosmix will be implemented at Walmart in more detail:

Quite a few of us at Kosmix have backgrounds in ecommerce, having worked at companies such as Amazon.com and eBay. As we worked on the Social Genome platform, it became apparent to us that this platform could transform ecommerce by providing an unprecedented level of understanding about customers and products, going well beyond purchase data. The Social Genome enables us to take search, personalization and recommendations to the next level.

Although Microsoft might have been a more “logical” buyer, in the context of this history and the wide range of capabilities that Kosmix brings to the retailing giant — but e-commerce laggard — it makes a good deal of sense.

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 not inadvertently restricting the search engines from accessing product listings or related content because the entire directory is accidentally blocked in robots.txt.

2.  Check noindex rules across your site

If you have implemented the noindex meta tag on large sections of your site based on certain guidelines, revisit these guidelines to make sure they are still relevant and do not conflict with other rules on the site. Do not submit pages with a noindex meta tag in your XML sitemap to search engines or shopping feeds. Make sure that rules in the robots.txt and noindex tag are consistent.

3.  Don’t embed HTML in the code of your feed

When submitting feeds to shopping engines, embedding html or stuffing promotional text in the product titles and descriptions will lead to messy and truncated titles and descriptions. Do not stuff promotional text into the product description as it could end up truncating oddly or even worse be removed from shopping engines.

4.  Miscategorizing listings in your feed

Shopping engines have algorithms to determine relevance and ranking based on the product type and category. Miscategorizing products in hopes of attaining a lower CPC can result in low visibility and virtually no traffic.

5.  Redirects

If you have recently relaunched a section of your site and redirected old pages to new ones, make sure the redirects are 301 (permanent redirects). If the pages have 302 or temporary redirects implemented, the new pages will not get indexed because the search engines will continue to think that the redirect is temporary.

6.  Duplicate Meta Titles

If you are generating meta titles dynamically based on the changing content of the page, make sure to check the rules and ensure that the meta titles and descriptions uniquely identify a particular page and are not so broad that they lead to duplicate content. Check your webmaster tools to check pages on your site that have duplicate meta title tags and/or duplicate meta description tags.

7.  Avoid duplicate product URLs in the feed

Don’t provide multiple URLs or landing pages for the same product or item. This will lead to duplicate content and will risk down ranking of all URLs due to this issue.

8.  Out-of-Stock products

When you submit your product listings to search engines or shopping engines, do not provide landing pages (URLs) that are broken, redirected or contain out of stock products. This will affect the CTR (click through rate) to your site as well as user perception with regard to the quality and consistency of your site. If the engine has a quality score in place, your site could be down ranked based on high bounce rates.

9.  Update product price, stock status, product description and best uses

Content has a shelf life and needs to be updated regularly to maintain its value. Outdated content when not monitored and evaluated can get out of control and lead to negative perception about the quality of your site. With the increased focus on quality content and value add pages in the search index, it is important to keep content current and clean. Updated content will keep conversions high and will also attract new users based on.

10.  Encourage external links to product specific pages

Don’t rely on external links to your homepage or domain. Analyze the distribution of quality external links to your home page vs. deep links to product specific pages.

Both search engines and shopping engines are advertising platforms for your site. Good, clean feeds are a requirement and not just a nice to have anymore. Optimizing and updating the listings you feed to search engines will help your site compete for a higher share of visibility as well as perform better from a conversion and revenue stand point. Put your best foot forward to share in the spotlight.

Once a user has opted-in, which can happen on AT&T’s site, Facebook or many other places (e.g., display ads online) that person will receive alerts (offers, promotions) when he or she physically enters the designated local area, which is defined by the advertiser (e.g., a mile from retail store XYZ).

Initial advertisers that have signed on include HP, Kmart, JetBlue, SC Johnson, Kibbles ‘n Bits, Nature’s Recipe and the National Milk Mustache “got milk?” Campaign. This program will work for marketers trying to drive in-store traffic or simply trying to reach mobile users in particular markets.

Nearly 100 percent of mobile phones today can send and receive SMS messages, thus giving a program like this much greater potential reach than mobile Web or app-based advertising. AT&T has 95 million US subscribers but I would expect this program (or a similar one) to be adopted by other US carriers as well.

Placecast powers a very similar marketing program for UK carrier O2, which has been running in the UK since last October. I was told that opt-out rates in that program are extremely low.

Shopping engines can drive tons of traffic from qualified, targeted buyers to your products. How about conversions? It’s time to ask. If you are tracking conversions, you’re in the game. Here’s how to play it to win.

Read on for 6 easy steps to achieve higher converting traffic from shopping engines.

1. Utilize Built-in ROI Trackers

Ask your shopping engine account manager if your account has an ROI tracker installed. It will allow you to review performance on both a category and product level by tracking sales, cost and conversion rates.

To bid smart, determine your return on ad spend and then find out what it takes to bid by category as well as on a product level. Request ongoing performance reports as well as specific recommendations on how your account can achieve higher conversions and lower cost of sales.

2. GIGO

Be wary of GIGO! When working with search engines of any type (product, travel, health or any other), garbage in is garbage out. Bad titles and descriptions will get you impressions for bad searches and tank your conversions. You will end up paying for poor quality traffic that has no chance of converting.

• Provide up to date product feeds. Outdated feeds may get you traffic, but the conversions and customer experience will be horrendous. Every interaction a shopper has with your site is an opportunity to build loyalty and lifetime customer value. An outdated feed reflects very poorly on your online presence and is bad for your brand as well.
• Optimize product titles and descriptions. Provide accurate and descriptive product titles. Always include the brand (for example Fisher-Price), product type (Rainforest 1-2-3 musical gym) and model number where relevant. Avoid grandiose names and technical jargon in product titles and descriptions. Search marketing is pull marketing where the user defines what they are looking for. If your product title does not match what the user is looking for and has its own terminology, it will never get found.

3. Provide MSRP Prices In The Feed

Shopping search engines do a ton of data extraction, analysis and processing to provide valuable research information and accurate data points to savvy shoppers. Providing accurate prices and additional details about your product can be the difference between an impression and a sale.

Shopping engines like Bizrate, Pricegrabber and Become.com highlight products with a percentage off or pop & save offers, leading to higher conversions for your product when the user is able to see that they are getting a good deal.

4. Call Out Your Promotions

When faced with dozens of products that match their requirements, what would make the user choose your product? What differentiates your product? Do you offer free shipping, exchanges or lowest price guarantees? Tell shoppers why they should choose you, and do it for every product listing you can.

5. Highlight Seasonal Products

Shopping search engines attract shoppers on thousands of keywords and customize their content and site experience for seasonal events. Supplement your product feed with seasonal data and update titles, descriptions to include seasonal messaging, such as ideas for Valentine’s Day gifts.

Provide top selling products by season. Share data on new products well in advance. Talk to your account manager to find out if there are additional opportunities like contests, shopping guides, editor’s picks or  Top 10 gift idea lists that can feature your products.

6. Audit Landing Pages With An Eye Toward Conversions

Go back to the fundamentals of website conversion. With all the changes to your website over the years, you may have lost a lot of the features that once worked; make sure you have these basics in place:

• Provide an updated feed to ensure that you do not attract and pay for traffic to your site if the product is out of stock. If the product is out of stock, provide the option for the shopper to be notified when the item is available.
• Does your landing page have a strong call to action? For example, “add to cart” or “add to favorites”. Don’t have too many calls to action on the same page. Focus on one.
• Provide clear, large images and detailed product specifications in your feed to shopping engines, as well as on your site.
• Offer something extra. It could be free shipping, limited time discount, coupon code, 14 day returns or warranties.
• Show progress through the conversion process. Shopping cart abandonment happens when shoppers are passed through multiple pages without an end in sight and without keeping information about the product, cost and other details on the page.
• Security and trust is important in any money transaction. Provide assurance that the payment system is secure. Display testimonials and reviews for the product on the payment page reassuring the shopper that this is a good buy.

Cleaning Up = Increased Conversions

The key takeaway is that it’s time to clean up. Go back to your data feeds and question what is in there, what could be cleaned up and what could be added. Ask how quickly your products make it to the shopping engine index, how frequently they are updated and what you could do to get more visibility.

You might also be surprised at the number of initiatives being tested and executed at large shopping engines. Reach out to your account manager and get them involved in your campaign performance to give yourself the competitive edge. Search marketing is about results and continuous improvements. Team up with your account manager to get your share of traffic, but more importantly, a larger share of conversions.

eBay may have decided, since Google unveiled local product inventory just a couple weeks ago, that it needed a response and that it wanted to own one of the principals in the segment. Milo had started to syndicate its data to third parties.

As more local products information comes online pure online shopping engines such as PriceGrabber, Nextag, Shopzilla and others become reduced to “generic” providers of pricing and reviews information. In that category Amazon has them all beat by a mile. Speaking of which I suspect Amazon will similarly be compelled to get into the local products game now that eBay and Google are both committed to it.

Last week another of the early companies in the space NearbyNow was acquired by JiWire. The only other “mature” company out there, relatively speaking, is Krillion. Retailigence, Goodzer and LuckyLocal re new entrants in the space, as well as smaller player Clarinova which is working with small retailers (the hardest part of the market).

Google, for its part, is working directly with retailers and not through a middleman or data syndicators. ShopLocal offers local sales information but not real-time product inventory.

For years offline product inventory information has been an aspiration for search engines and shopping sites. But now with a number of startups chasing the segment and building the infrastructure, and with the advent of mobile and LBS, retailers see product data as a way to drive mobile and online customers into stores. According to estimates and surveys by the e-Tailing Group, roughly 15 to 20 percent of US retailers now have real-time inventory data online or otherwise available for online distribution.

The segment is now very real and we should continue to see it accelerate in the next 12-18 months. In the not-too-distant future it will be quite common to find out where a specific product can be purchased locally by looking online or consulting a smartphone app.

But before we get started let me first ask the naming gods to next year revisit and banish “Cyber Monday” from the tech lexicon — or dare I say “texicon.” And maybe we need yet a third day (or at least third phrase) after Black Friday and Cyber Monday to acknowledge the role that mobile shopping is starting to play in the whole process.

The big search engines

Of course all the search engines have shopping sites. Yahoo offers a wealth of resources including a holiday gift buying guide and Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals guide. As part of that you get all the “newspaper circular” ads being distributed this week that show Black Friday deals in stores. There’s also a dedicated Deals area on Yahoo Shopping.

Bing Shopping doesn’t have quite the same breadth as Yahoo or the Black Friday deals information but it has a helpful holiday gift guide for those looking for gift-buying inspiration. Bing is also a very good shopping engine.

Google Product Search/Shopping is the most “no frills” of the three. However, as of last week,  it can show you local stores that carry the desired item and whether it’s in stock — helpful for those who need it now or don’t want to buy it online.

In the female apparel category, Google now also offers the un-Googly Boutiques.com. It joins a growing list of “social shopping” sites targeting women, which include Kaboodle, StyleHive, Polyvore and quite a few others.

Ask and AOL offer shopping sites as well. Ask’s site is powered by parent IAC’s shopping engine Pronto, which offers a better experience than Ask itself.

I hadn’t been to AOL Shopping in a very long time and was pleasantly surprised to see all the content and resources there, including deals, hot lists and buying guides.

Amazon, eBay and the comparison sites

Amazon is far and away the king of online shopping. The company has two mobile shopping apps, including the useful new Price Check, for in-store product and price comparisons. Earlier this year Amazon announced that it would process a staggering $1 billion in mobile orders. EBay is the other US company that’s doing a huge mobile business. I’m not a fan of eBay but it has lots of holiday shopping resources, including daily deals.

I’ve already mentioned Pronto above. But the old, familiar comparison engines are there to offer price checks and reviews and deals (in some cases). Although useful most of the sites in this category are pretty tired and feature “generic” and largely undifferentiated experiences. That includes Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, Nextag, Shopzilla and others.

Standouts in this category include TheFind (which has good mobile apps too). And of course Overstock.com is another very popular site. Become.com also has a special Black Friday section.

Looking for deals?

As mentioned Yahoo and eBay have deals areas that offer substantial discounts on products. However coupons and deals, it seems, are everywhere this year. The recession has caused this but Groupon‘s success is also partly responsible for spawning a cottage industry.

It was only a couple of years ago when online deals and coupons meant bait and switch. You were lured to sites only to discover that the promised deal wasn’t there. Now it’s almost impossible to list all the deal sites online. There are well over 100 daily deal sites now operating in the US.

In addition to those mentioned above, here are a few useful and noteworthy sites:

• The Dealmap (offers Black Friday deals offline, nearby)
• Retailmenot (deals at popular online retailers, includes Black Friday deals)
• LivingSocial (like Groupon but offers excellent travel deals)
• Savings.com (deals from major retailers)
• Yipit (aggregates daily deals form multiple sources)

Finding products locally

There are a growing number of sites that help consumers find products in local stores, offline. Google is making a big push into this area, as mentioned. And Goodzer just launched for New York this morning. And I just discovered another local product inventory site called LuckyLocal.com.

Milo wants to be the Google of local products, although Google is now trying to be the Google of local products. Milo allows users to search for and locate in-stock product inventory nearby. There’s also a Black Friday area on the site.

NearbyNow powers third party mobile apps that offer local product inventory. And so do Krillion and Retailigence. However, you can search and shop directly on Krillion where you cannot on the other two.

Along the same lines, these days ShopLocal is less a consumer destination than it used to be; it has become more of a marketing platform for retailers. However you can still access all the major retailer sales, products and Black Friday promotions on the site, as well as other types of coupons.

TheFind also offers a “shop nearby” feature that shows retailers that carry the desired product.

Shopping apps: while you’re in the store

The number of shopping apps for smartphones is proliferating like mushrooms in a field after a heavy rain. All of the major search engines and shopping comparison sites offer mobile apps for the iPhone, and Android in most cases. Bing does not currently have a specialized shopping app or tool. You can access Bing Shopping from a mobile browser however.

Most major retailers (e.g., Target, Gap) have mobile shopping apps that can be used to find stores, check products and see what’s on sale. As previously discussed, Amazon and eBay have mobile apps. Amazon’s new Price Check app is very user friendly and helpful for in-store review and price comparisons, which is the information (reviews, pricing) that most consumers are looking for from mobile shopping apps.

TGI Black Friday is a popular app for both the iPhone and Android, although the query “Black Friday” returns at least 20 apps on the iPhone.

Google Shopper (only for Android) is much more user-friendly than accessing Google Product Search through the mobile web. It also has local product inventory data, voice search and image and barcode scanning.

Speaking of which, there are more than a dozen stand-alone barcode scanning apps that can be used in stores (although retailers don’t like it). Two of the most popular are RedLaser and Scanbuy. The dirty secret of barcode scanning is that it often doesn’t work. That’s why it’s good to use an app that allows for multiple input methods, such as Price Check or Google Shopper or TheFind.

Finally, Foursquare, Shopkick, Gowalla, Yelp and several others reward users with deals and discounts for checking in at physical stores and local businesses. This isn’t Black Friday/Cyber Monday centric but there are retailers that are using these sites (especially ShopKick and Foursquare) for promotions.

This list unfortunately just scratches the surface of mobile shopping apps. But as John Lennon (or maybe Ringo Starr) once said, “I’ve got blisters on my fingers.”

More for Black Friday / Cyber Monday tips, also see here on Techmeme.

Happy Thanksgiving and may the shopping force be with you.

Google did not confirm the rumors but did reply to Kara’s press request in Google fashion:

Per usual, we don’t comment on rumor or speculation. If we did we’d be busy 24/7!

Groupon is a local deals coupon site that has grown in popularity. Clone after clone has been created trying to replicate the model. To learn more about Groupon, see our article named A Look At Social Shopping With Groupon by Michael Gray.

There were rumors of earlier that Yahoo would buy the local deals site, but Yahoo went at it alone.

For more coverage on this rumor, see Techmeme.

Postscript: See Google To Buy Groupon This Week In $5 to $6 Billion Deal?