If Bing can brand itself “decision engine” as a strategy to differentiate  from the leading “search engine” so can shopping comparison site TheFind. The latter is now calling itself a “buying engine” as a way to emerge from the anonymous sea of shopping search sites out there.

This morning a redesigned TheFind went live with a range of new features, including enhanced product search, coupon aggregation for 50 million products, review search, local inventory and beefed up information about online stores. Beyond a somewhat new look and feel, review search and coupon aggregation are the truly new content areas for the site, which claims to have indexed more than 350 million products from over 500,000 stores through crawling.

TheFind’s CEO Siva Kumar told me that the new site and content is aimed at fulfilling consumer needs at every stage of the buying cycle from research to where to purchase locally. (Local data are from Krillion and NearbyNow.) Among other capabilities, the new capacity to search and filter by coupons, sales or free shipping should prove to be very popular with consumers. (Ask not long ago launched coupon and deal search to capitalize on the hot coupons trend.)

Kumar emphasized the company’s consumer orientation and focus. He added that because of this consumer focus the site is right now under-monetizing vs. its potential, in marked contrast to the bulk of “shopping engines” that have become largely advertising vehicles for e-commerce merchants or search arbitrage sites.

Beyond major branded retailers such as Target, BestBuy and so on, there are only a couple of true shopping “destinations” online, Amazon being one of them. A relatively new generation of shopping sites, such as TheFind or Wize, are trying to move beyond the me-too shopping experience of most comparison engines and appeal to consumers with content, comprehensiveness or features that make them top-of-mind destinations — rather than “one-off” visits through SEM or SEO links in Google. Meanwhile Bing has staked out shopping search as one of its four “strategic verticals.”

TheFind says that it now has 13.5 monthly unique visitors in the US and counting. Beyond the new site, TheFind has for some time had a nicely done iPhone app:

This mobile-PC shopping connection will grow more important over time as consumers with internet-capable handsets bounce back and forth between online and local stores, comparing prices, reviews and local inventory data online and in mobile.

Online comparison shopping is a relatively mature “vertical” but it’s ripe for (I won’t say “disruption”) change and evolution, especially as mobile becomes a more significant part of the experience for consumers.

What amazes me is that in more than a decade no “brand” has really emerged in shopping search. What do I mean by “brand”? I mean a site that’s top-of-mind for consumers, trusted and that they navigate to directly for products and product information. One could say that the exceptions to this are Amazon, eBay (probably) and CNET in the consumer electronics category. But there are literally dozens and dozens of shopping sites that have been playing the search arbitrage game or trying their best to rank for product-related searches. But they’re not really building any “brand equity” or long-term value.

The major search engines each have shopping sites. Both Bing and Yahoo have made considerable investments in their shopping efforts. Yahoo offers an elaborate shopping destination that includes deals, coupons and newspaper circulars. Microsoft considers shopping to be one of the “four strategic verticals.” The others are local, health and travel. Indeed, shopping and Microsoft’s related “cashback” program (built on its acquisition of Jellyfish) have been heavily promoted as a hook to get consumers to use Bing. Among the three Google’s Product Search is arguably the weakest entry.

For its part, Wize has been one of the many shopping engines in the background. Chris Sherman wrote a favorable review of the site in early 2007. At the time, Wize was trying to simplify product ratings and reviews and roll them into a proprietary “Wize Rank” algorithm that mashed up expert and user reviews. The novel approach was not enough to help Wize break out of the pack or become a top-of-mind shopping destination. Now the site has redesigned and relaunched and is hoping to gain usage by being more intuitive and easier to use. According to the release out this morning the site offers a range of new features including Twitter integration:

• Wize Choice Recommendations: An authoritative opinion on the best and worst products available on the Web based on Wize’s proprietary analysis engine
• Wize Brand Choice: For each product category featured on Wize.com, Wize reads how people describe a specific brand within a product category – e.g. Kodak – and the words and phrases associated with the brand
• Wize Review Search: The ability to search through all the product reviews for any given consumer need or query any given product – e.g. battery life
• Wize Product Organizer: Users are able to store, capture and compare all of their favorite products during their product research session to make research easier
• Twitter Integration: Recommendations include real-time feeds from Twitter

Wize is extracting key information and phrases from large numbers of aggregated product reviews and making that available as filters to users, mirroring the way people typically think and speak about products. Here’s a result for “camcorders” for example:

The “more” drop-down menu more fully illustrates this:

It’s also using a “wize choice” and “unwize choice” labeling system to simplifying decision making. In addition a ranking of top products for each filter or criterion is very useful as a way to narrow and simplify product choices.

Overall, the new site is a significant improvement over the previous incarnation of Wize. Now that Wize has mirrored the way people talk and think about products, the site just needs to integrate local inventory information (i.e., from Krillion, NearbyNow) to reflect the way that people do product research online before typically buying offline in stores.

Hitwise is reporting that Bing Shopping moved up to 4th place (from 8th) in the comparision shopping tools category last week, rising to 11% weekly market share. Combining the recent Double Cashback offer from retailers listed on Bing Shopping and the fortunate timing of the annual Back-to-School shopping rush has moved their weekly market share up from just 4% of visits prior to last week.

chart courtesy of Hitwise

Overall, Hitwise reports that visits to Bing Shopping have increased 169% since the week ending June 6th (the week of the official Bing Shopping launch) – Bing confirms an 3x increase in visits from internal data during the same timeframe.

Also in that same timeframe, Yahoo! Shopping, Bizrate and Shopzilla, currently the top 3 shopping comparision engines, each saw a drop of 2-5% in market share. Meanwhile, the only other shopping search engines in the top 10 to experience an increase were NexTag and Pronto.

Bing.com was responsible for sending 18.32% of visits, of those, 66.81% were new visitors (had not visited in last 30 days) and traffic from MSN accounted for another 11.34% of visits. Of last week’s visits to Bing Shopping, Google sent 5.86% and Yahoo! Search sent another 3.54% – an interesting number to watch change in the coming months as the integration of Bing and Yahoo moves forward.

For additional numbers and data on upstream / downstream traffic related to Bing Shopping, read Heather Dougherty’s post at Hitwise.

It didn’t take long for commerce to move online when the WWW was invented in the early ’90s, and it hasn’t taken long for the same migration to happen as new social networks become important parts of our everyday lives. Don’t be surprised if, in the not too distant future, you find yourself using social networking sites to shop, or at least to start the buying process.

Twitter as a shopping search engine? You bet. And not only that, but there are also several sites that aim to dig through the clutter and uncover the best deals and coupons that people are talking about and recommending.

Here’s a look at three companies that are turning Twitter into a new kind of shopping search engine.

CheapTweet

CheapTweet’s slogan sums up the service nicely: “Scouring Twitter for deals so you don’t have to.” It scans Twitter for references to sales, deals, and specials and adds them to its web site. CheapTweet has a help page with tips for stores that want their tweets included — things like be specific with details of the deal, include a useful link, and don’t spam (by repeating the deal several times). There’s also a #cheaptweet hashtag that stores can use to notify CheapTweet, but it’s not necessary.

There’s a human voting element involved, too, which might help cut down on spam. The CheapTweet web site includes Digg-like voting; users can vote the tweet-deals up or down, and the number of retweets of the deal in Twitter’s system also gives the deal added exposure.

One sign that CheapTweet is catching on: Overstock.com and a few other companies have set up official “CheapTweet stores” (here’s Overstock’s store) where all of their tweet-deals are aggregated on a single page.

Coupon Tweet

Coupon Tweet operates under a generally similar principle: It aggregates coupon and deal-related tweets and categorizes them on its web site. On top of that, Coupon Tweet says it has “a team of deal finders” that help add tweet-deals to its web site.

Coupon Tweet also has user voting to help surface the best deals and downplay the rest. There are also “stores” that list all the tweet-deals from individual retailers, but it’s unclear if any of the merchants are actually participating in these.

TinyMassive

There are countless Twitter users that post deals in their tweet stream, but TinyMassive offers a unique service: Send a tweet to @tinymassive with the name of the product you’re searching for, and they’ll reply with a price and link to purchase it via their web site. (TinyMassive presumably gets a small commission if you buy.) It’s a clever idea — sort of a shopping concierge just a tweet away.

The main TinyMassive.com web site is billed as a social comparison shopping engine, and functions more like a traditional shopping search engine than CheapTweet and Coupon Tweet.

Final Thoughts

Traditional shopping search engines probably aren’t nervous about losing market share to social media just yet. The main shopping engines have established relationships with thousands of merchants big and small, and they have information on millions of products — whether they’re on sale or not. The services listed here are far less comprehensive by their focus on sales and deals. But those limitations notwithstanding, it’s inevitable that, as the general population continues to embrace Twitter and other social media, product search opportunities and services will follow.

Each day millions of online shoppers turn to comparison shopping engines (CSEs) to compare prices, read reviews, research products and make buying decisions. While comparison shopping engines don’t sell or ship the products featured on their sites, they advertise products from merchants to a diverse online audience. Merchants are using CSEs in a down economy to capture shoppers looking for deals. To take advantage of this growing advertising space and get more exposure than your competitors, you need a product data feed—and even more importantly, you must optimize the feed to gain maximum exposure in CSE search results.

The number of online shoppers is increasing, and they’re internet-savvy. They will scan a product page for what interests them—the best price, a brand they trust, free shipping or seasonal discounts. It’s no surprise that clickthrough rates (CTR) and conversions increase when:

• Titles are relevant: Is this what I am searching for?
• Descriptions are engaging: Is this the right size, color, style?
• Promotions are enticing: Should I buy this now?

Perfect your listings! Making the leap from interest to conversion

Here are some specific tips for optimizing feeds to maximize your exposure in shopping engine results:

Craft targeted, keyword focused titles. On search engines, the online shopper controls what they see. They will search for brand, model, product type and product attributes. Shopping engines bold the keywords in your product title that match the shopper’s query. Bolded keywords in the product title increase the click attractiveness of your listing and also qualify your lead.

Map your products to the taxonomy of each CSE. Loose classifications lead to fewer and poor quality clicks, but what will hurt your campaign most is the missed opportunity of qualified shopping traffic that could easily have been yours if your products were correctly categorized. If you sell iPods and submit them as electronics in your feed, your competitors are likely to outperform you, taking sales that might have been yours.

Products that are not mapped to the right taxonomy, are not granular in their categorization, or are left uncategorized are at a disadvantage because more closely mapped products will climb in the rankings and get a disproportionate number of impressions.

Include detailed product specifications, attributes and features for each product. Detailed product specifications will surface your listing more frequently for targeted keywords with higher shopping intent, leading to more conversions. Here is a great example: “This energy efficient coffee grinder makes grinding coffee beans an easy task. Features stainless steel blades, easy access cord storage and 2-ounce capacity for 12 cups of coffee. Great for making flavored coffees.” If a shopper searches for a 12 cup coffee maker, this merchant will surface.

Cross-sell related products.: Include product uses such as “can be used with,” “best suited for,” and so on so your product may be displayed as a related product or “shoppers also viewed,” increasing visibility and appeal to shoppers.

Add visual prominence with images and logos. Large images get more attention and are the first to be picked for featured pages and shopping blog entries. Shoppers love close-up images and pictures that show multiple angles of the product. Even if CSEs display a thumbnail image on the search results, if you provide a full size image of the product most will offer shoppers the ability to click through to the full size image of your product. In the blog post below, the blogger has chosen to feature a picture with multiple views of trail running shoes to provide a more detailed visual for the write-up.

CSEs may also allow you to add your logo for an additional charge, a feature that gets attention and lends credibility to your product listing.

Tune your marketing message. Savvy shoppers are always looking for deals, discounts, specials, free shipping or other savings online. If you offer specials, provide these promotions in the feed to CSEs. Products that display promotions will not only attract more attention on product search pages, but will get highlighted on featured deals and promotions pages. Many CSEs feature specials on their blog, tweet about them or highlight the promotion on a “daily deals” page. Some CSEs offer a promotional text feature, allowing you to advertise these deals with your products listings. In the PriceGrabber deal of the day below, the “Planet Earth – Complete Collection” Blu-ray DVD is featured as the deal of the day.

Don’t spend—invest. Spending gets cut in a tight economy, but investments continue. Track your ROI. As long as you’re seeing return, it is an investment. Work with your CSE to closely track conversions on the traffic you receive. If possible, consider installing any available ROI tracker the CSE provides to better analyze performance. When the economy recovers, your margins will multiply because you will know exactly where to invest for greater returns.

Promote hot products and seasonal items in your feed. CSEs want to help their retailers promote their products, and this data is important! Surface your seasonal products in the feed and call them out. Most CSE’s actively scour their products for seasonal items and promote them on special seasonal features, such as guides, newsletters, press releases, shopping blogs, tweets and more.

Strive to get in the top three listings. Whether on a search engine like Google or a CSE, the top three results get the lion’s share of qualified leads. Analytics show that even on shopping sites, conversions for the top three listings are disproportionately high. Quality score matters on shopping engines too. In addition to bidding, relevance and popularity impact the position of your listing. A placement above the fold gets a disproportionate number of eyeballs from shoppers, so it’s important to optimize your feed.

Make it stick. Increase your branding and visibility to consumers through other advertising channels like banner advertising or page sponsorship. Just as paid ads coupled with organic search results in Google boost traffic to the site, banner ads on comparison shopping sites improve branding and traffic to your site.

Merchants who pay attention to optimizing their feeds and leverage the advanced features and new opportunities offered by CSEs will position themselves for increased traffic and conversions.

Searchme has rolled out what it calls “true” blended search results, combining web, video, images, music and Twitter results organized by their relevance and playable inside the search results page. Searchme displays results as small versions of entire web pages, in a format that looks just like the “cover flow” display in iTunes.

I love Searchme as a “recall engine,” using it to find web pages or sites that I’ve previously visited but can’t remember the site name or URL. The visual display of results, with the ability to quickly scroll through mini-versions of pages makes it easy to recognize sites that I’ve already seen.

I also love Searchme’s music search capabilities. Through an arrangement with iMeem, you can play entire songs, directly from the music search result page. It’s a great way to decide whether you want to buy a song from iTunes or Amazon (both of which only let you hear 30 second snippets of songs).

Searchme also offers a sort of “visual bookmarks” feature called “stacks” that let you save pointers to content you want to revisit.

Searchme likely won’t replace your regular search engine, but it offers enough really cool and useful features that you’ll want to add it to your web search arsenal.

Google has upgraded product search for mobile, on Android and iPhone devices, to allow users to get price, product specs and reviews information on their handsets. Google posted about it here.

Users can either navigate directly to Google Shopping on their smartphone handsets (under the “more” pull-down) and enter a query or do the same in the main mobile search box and then scroll to the “Shopping Results” on the main SERP. Either way you are sent into a new, optimized mobile shopping experience. Under an “options” pull-down in the upper right of the mobile screen, you can sort by price, ratings, brands and stores (online only for now).

Here’s the associated Google video demo:

Many people are using their handsets in stores to check price and product reviews to validate that the item they’re standing in front of is worthy and/or not substantially cheaper online. There are a growing number of mobile shopping apps and sites contemplating this use case. Among Android apps, the best known is ShopSavvy, which features a bar code scanner that takes advantage of the phone’s camera to deliver price, reviews and local inventory data.

Yahoo Mobile also offers price and product information similar to what Google is doing. Recognizing the growing importance of mobile product search and price comparisons, every shopping engine and product reviews site will soon offer a mobile-optimized version of itself and/or an app.

Postscript: I neglected to mention that Live Search has offered comparable functionality since last year.

Microsoft successfully bid to acquire Greenfield Online for approximately $486 million. But Microsoft isn’t really interested in Greenfield, it was after the company’s subsidiary Ciao GmbH.

Founded in 1999 and acquired by Greenfield in 2005, Ciao is an Munich-based EU comparison shopping site with user reviews.

According to the press release out this morning:

The acquisition signals a further milestone investment for Microsoft in Europe and will see Microsoft increase its European commercial search capabilities as part of its intent to make Microsoft Live Search the premier destination for consumers looking to research and purchase goods and services online, as well as enable merchants to drive greater online sales.

By contrast Microsoft also said in the release that it has “found a buyer” (unnamed) for Greenfield Online’s Internet survey division. Microsoft cites comScore data, saying that Ciao the shopping engine has more than 26.5 million unique visitors per month across several European sites.

Microsoft beat out private equity firm Quadrangle for the deal. There’s a hint of irony here: Yahoo’s former COO Dan Rosensweig is one of Quadrangle’s partners. Quadrangle had been mentioned as a “white knight” potentially during the MicroHoo episode (Rosensweig had even been mentioned as a possible Jerry Yang successor at one point). And, as PaidContent reports, Yahoo has been looking to sell its EU comparison engine Kelkoo, which Microsoft apparently considered buying but passed on.

There’s more discussion at Techmeme.

For some time I’ve tried to argue that product search is part of “local search,” because 90 percent or more of all products searched for online are purchased in physical stores. This is a neglected part of the local search story, which has heretofore largely been about “plumbers and pizza.” But the internet is fundamentally a research tool that drives offline transactions. E-commerce is, relatively speaking, a niche phenomenon.

That’s why mobile applications such as TheFind’s new iPhone app or Slifter and others are significant: they help bridge the gap between the internet and physical stores. They also help make this online-offline connection more transparent to brands, retailers and agencies.

Nielsen found in May of this year that among “a representative group of people who had recently made consumer electronics purchases in a brick and mortar store, 80 percent bought from a store whose Web site they visited first.”

Two years ago BIGResearch released data showing that 89 percent of consumers making in-store purchases in key categories conducted online research prior to purchase. There is much more data, from comScore, Yahoo and others, validating the pattern: consumers research online but buy offline.

A range of companies has been building out local inventory data or mechanisms that allow consumers to search for and, in some cases, reserve products in local retail stores: Krillion, NearbyNow, Shopatron, Where2GetIt, Channel Intelligence, ShopLocal. Those data are starting to make their way more broadly online and soon we’ll see an explosion of it all over the internet. While Amazon probably won’t be threatened by this, no-name e-tailers will likely suffer.

Krillion, NearbyNow and Where2GetIt were on a panel at SMX Local-Mobile discussing product inventory syndication, store finders and mobile distribution.

In-store price comparison search using mobile devices is already happening. That is: people looking at a product in the store trying to decide if the price is competitive. But the combination of in-store inventory data with device location-awareness is extremely powerful: “They don’t have it here; where can I find it within a reasonable driving (or walking) distance from here?”

People are wondering about mobile advertising and “how far off” it is. This above use case immediately brings with it myriad advertising opportunities, including opt-in sales and product alerts and coupons on mobile devices. The iPhone is where all this will immediately become evident, but it will play out more broadly on other smartphones and later feature phones. And this is all near-term stuff. Indeed, the era of product and shopping search on mobile devices is already here.

Microsoft has invested heavily in Live Search and seen its search relevance and results improve but so far not its market share. The company believes its core search results are as good as what you’ll find on Google or Yahoo. But its share is flat-to-declining, depending on which of the metrics services you choose to consult (Nielsen most recently found Live Search had dipped below 10 percent). The frustrations surrounding these investments (and improvements) in search without commensurate market share growth is part of what is driving Microsoft’s quest for Yahoo or, now, at least its search business.

But Redmond is also taking a long term view. The company sees search changing over time. It sees the core technologies changing, consumer expectations growing and changing, and the economic model of search changing. On the latter two points, Microsoft is introducing a program today that it calls “Live Search Cashback.” This marries consumer incentives (hence the name: “cash back”) with a cost-per-action (CPA) model for advertisers.

In roughly October of last year, Microsoft bought Jellyfish, a comparison shopping site with a unique reverse auction business model that offers consumers deals and cash back on products and charges marketers a fee on those products actually purchased, using a CPA model, rather PPC. Here’s what the Live Search team said at the time of the acquisition: “We think the technology has some interesting potential applications as we continue to invest heavily in shopping and commerce as a key component of Live Search.” Live Search Cashback is built on the Jellyfish concept (and system) of offering consumers incentives from merchants and charging those merchants for a small piece of the transaction. While Google has experimented with CPA in AdSense this is the first time a CPA model makes its way into paid search advertising (more on the ad model below.) Microsoft says it has more than 720 merchants, building on Jellyfish, already participating in the program.

As an example of how it works, say users conduct a product search for a “Zune”:

They see advertisers with a corresponding icon that indicates they’re participating in the program:

This program only applies to paid results and the “cashback” icons should drive improved CTRs. But merchants aren’t charged on that basis — only upon a transaction.

Once users click the ad/link, they’re taken to a merchant-level page or, in this case a Zune product page:

As you click on an individual product, you’re required to sign in and then taken to the merchant’s site to purchase the product:

The cashback incentives are stored in the system and later paid to the end user by Microsoft. Payment can be through PayPal or a check sent to the user or the money directly deposited into an individual’s bank account. There’s a roughly 60-day delay between the purchase and delivery of rebates to prevent fraud.

Microsoft was widely criticized when, a couple of years ago, it floated the idea of sharing paid search ad revenues with users as a way to create incentives to use Live Search. But this is that very idea, more elegantly packaged and presented. It’s coherent in a way that the earlier idea wasn’t because it’s tied directly to products and commercial search.

What this does for participating advertisers is eliminate concerns about click fraud and, according to Microsoft, the “need for complicated analytics.”

Microsoft believes the program will attract and engage users. The company then thinks it can acclimate and, to some degree, habituate users to Live Search. Indeed, Redmond believes that “Cashback loyalists will drive more queries.”

One of the reasons that Google has been so successful is that considerable “inertia” has built up around its usage. People are comfortable and familiar with Google and the way it works with little incentive to change their behavior. Live Search Cashback may help create sufficient incentives and “escape velocity” for some to break away from their Google habit and try Live Search. We’ll have to see.

It will also be interesting to see what Google and Yahoo’s responses will be. Will they emulate or imitate aspects of the program? Like Ask with Ask 3D interface, Microsoft can be a risk-taker by introducing a CPA model because it’s not putting gobs of PPC revenue at risk in the way that Google would be if it did something similar.

While there may be some adjustment to the program, advertisers will likely appreciate it for the elimination of potential click fraud and the fact they’re only paying when an actual transaction occurs. Microsoft didn’t elaborate on next steps for Cashback but it could expand into other areas, such as travel or offline purchases.

Danny and Barry test out the system and express some reservations and frustrations.