The Silicon Beat blog reported the beta launch of ShopWiki, a comparison shopping engine (http://digbig.com/4hfec). According to the ShopWiki website, it is the only shopping search engine that combines advanced Web crawling technology with consumer-written wiki buying guides to help shoppers make the most informed buying decisions. A wiki is a group of easy-to-edit Web pages that allow the public give their input on what they know about a certain topic or product.

Former DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan and CTO Dwight Merriman founded ShopWiki in New York City in 2005 with the goal of indexing everything that can be bought online. The Wiki buying guides allow users to edit, change and add to any buying guide "to ensure other community members are given the most accurate, up-to-date information available."

In explaining how it is unique, ShopWiki's site says, "While regular search engines index all of the words on the page, ShopWiki uses unique data-extraction technology and artificial intelligence techniques to extract the structure of the page,... The data extraction problem is a complex one that has stumped engineers for years. To our knowledge, ShopWiki is the only shopping search engine that operates from 100% crawled data, with no data feeds."

ShopWiki competitors include eBay's Shopping.com and Scripps' Shopzilla.com.

http://shopwiki.com