According to comScore data, Google Product Search has become the top comparison shopping engine online. Number two is now TheFind, which moved in front of Yahoo Shopping in terms of average daily users: Source: comScore TheFind has been quietly moving up the ladder over the past couple of years and now has surpassed all longer-established […]
There are a number of “social shopping” sites and, of course, numerous product or shopping-related blogs. Among the most visible in the first category are Kaboodle, ThisNext/Stylehive and Polyvore. They offer tools and features that allow people to share, compare and vote on products. The mainstream shopping comparison engines such as Shopping.com or PriceGrabber don’t […]
These days, local marketing can seem a lot more complicated to the average small business owner than it used to be—and for very good reason. With advances in digital offerings, small businesses are now confronted with a growing range of possibilities for their ad dollars. Moreover, owners are faced with the harder task of determining […]
The Google Mobile Blog announced a neat new search app for Android named Google Shopper. You just point the app at books, CDs, DVDs, and video games, and barcodes and it will fetch the details of that product and give you the prices, stores, reviews and more about that product. I tested it out on […]
According to Google, affiliates provide such a road-rage-awful experience that they deserved to be kicked out of AdWords en masse. My experience shopping for a new laptop for my dad during Boxing Week more than proved that status as an affiliate site hardly determines usability, and that merchants sin liberally against the commandments of user […]
I may be the only one who noticed, but it seems to me that 2009 saw an unusual amount of new comparison search tools released. Perhaps it was the launch of Bing, or the growth of real-time search? I don’t know, but something inspired programmers to develop new tools and sites to let us compare […]
Here are a couple important areas for Industrial Strength search marketers to focus on right now, both of which are feed-based: Google Product Search and Yahoo! Paid Inclusion. Below I outline why these channels matter more than ever this holiday season, and how they can help you capture substantial traffic and sales. Google Product Search […]
Google’s now officially announced “Comparison Ads,” starting with a way for mortgage advertisers to have their products compared against each other but which may expand to other products in the future. “If you’re looking for a mortgage, you really care about a specific offer. You want to know the APR and based on your specific […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Let’s just get it out of the way: no, Bing is not a “Google Killer.” It’s also safe to say that Microsoft doesn’t see it that way either. My understanding of what Microsoft believes it has in Bing is a much more competitive product than Live Search. I entirely agree. Over the course of the […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: How To Optimize Feeds To Maximize Your Exposure In Shopping Engine Results Each day millions of online shoppers turn to comparison shopping engines (CSEs) to compare prices, read reviews, research products […]
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 […]
Across the globe, retailers are bracing for a challenging holiday shopping season. If you run an ecommerce site, what can you do to be sure to get the most out of “Cyber Monday” (the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States which falls on Dec. 1 this year) and beyond? […]
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.
Loren Baker covered a small update to Google’s Merchant Search, which we outed back in May. Currently, Google Merchant Search is available in the UK and allows you to compare loan providers. When I covered it originally, it wasn’t available to everyone, but now it appears to be live. Conduct a search for secured loans […]
As the price of gasoline is speeds toward $5.00, it’s no surprise that tools helping consumers find less expensive gas are gaining visibility and popularity. Search Engine Journal and Google Maps Mania both have had nice roundups recently. Below, a look at some of the tools from them plus some additional ones and whether the […]
A reader sent us an example of the new Google Merchant Search live and in the wild. What’s Google Merchant Search? After a little poking around, it appears to be a new but unannounced program in beta where people can comparison shop services like loans. Here are the Google Merchant Search FAQs, and here is […]
I’ve got no problem if Microsoft wants to “bribe” searchers to use its search engine. Even Google has done the same. But the Live Search Cashback program rolled out today seems a pretty inept way to do it, far more likely to disappoint and frustrate than woo searchers.
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 […]
I’ve personally never found Google Product search all that useful, but hopefully that will change now. Google Operating System reports that Google Product Search has undergone a redesign of some sort. In the past, Google Product Search just showed you results but did not group stores offering to sell the same product with reviews and […]
Microsoft’s MSNBot is doing more crawling these days and is alerting webmasters accordingly to revisit robots.txt files. More detail can be found on the Live Search Webmaster blog. In other news, Live Search blogs officially talked about its version of sitelinks that first appeared back in September (and see here).
This Thursday is the US Thanksgiving holiday, so Friday marks the official start of the holiday shopping season for a large percentage of US consumers. Infamously known as “Black Friday” (for profit potential), many “big box” retailers will open at midnight or in the early morning hours to long lines of consumers hoping to capture […]
In the context of a larger discussion of how data mining is being used by several Internet sites, Gary Price posts about the introduction of hotel search on the Farecast site. Farecast’s core service has sought to save consumers money by using historical information and other data to determine whether airfares are rising or falling […]
Microsoft has announced the acquisition of a comparison shopping engine named Jellyfish.com. Microsoft believes that Jellyfish’s technology “has some interesting potential applications” that they can make a “key component” of Live Search.
Often when people discuss local search they’re referring to finding restaurants or plumbers. But the concept of “local search” should include goods and product purchases as well. Whenever I discuss products and retail as part of the definition of local search people are often a little skeptical. Yet again and again studies show that consumers […]
Today Superpages formally rolled out a compare merchants feature. In doing so it becomes the second major US yellow pages publisher to offer that feature in its online directory. DexKnows, owned by R.H. Donnelley and powered by Local Matters‘ “destination search” platform, has offered the feature for some time. This article is part of Local […]
Mahalo Follow is a new toolbar that allows you to view Mahalo’s human-powered search results next to the results from the major search engine of your choice or have them appear in response to pages you view on the web. Mahalo Launches With Human-Crafted Search Results from me in May explains more about the Mahalo […]
As part of our Google Free Mondays series this month, today is the day to try Microsoft’s Windows Live. Wait, wasn’t it Google Free Fridays this month? Yes, but I changed it to Mondays. And why do we hate Google so much we’re telling people not to use it? We don’t hate Google, silly. My […]
A few weeks back, we looked at how the major engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, handled shopping search. This week we look at four of the dedicated shopping search portals: BizRate.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, NexTag.com, and a relative newcomer to the space, Become.com. Each of these properties matched up quite well in terms of user experience […]
Lee Odden spotted Google testing this very unusual user interface. In short, some of his searches are displaying Google results that are grouped by category. I used Lee’s screen capture and cropped it a bit to fit here.
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.”
MySupermarket is one of those sites that you sometimes look at and immediately think ‘I’ll be coming back here on a regular basis’. The concept is very simple – you choose one of 4 UK supermarkets from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Ocado and you shop for your groceries. All the groceries are shown in illustrated […]