This article is reprinted with permission from SearchDay, a free daily newsletter from SearchEngineWatch.com.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday Copyright (c) 2002 Jupitermedia Corporation.
Capping off SearchDay's shopping search week, here's a roundup of some of the web's most popular and useful shopping and price comparison search engines. This list is by no means comprehensive. Rather, it focuses on large, popular shopping search services. Similarly, this roundup focuses only on general purpose shopping search engines. There are countless specialized engines for product categories such as books, computer hardware and software, and so on. I'll take a look at some of those specialized sites in a future issue.
BizRate.com
http://www.bizrate.com
BizRate allows you to search for products from hundreds of online vendors. Features include merchant ratings, reviews, tax and shipping information, as well as a list of your own most searches and recently viewed products.
Buyer's Index
http://www.buyersindex.com
Offers search of more than 20,000 web shopping sites and mail order catalogs with over 300 million product offerings. Incorporates reliability indicators from The Public Eye and BizRate.com. Buyer's Index also has information about the year established and a 20 word description of each retailer.
eShop - MSN Shopping
http://shopping.msn.com
MSN Shopping is one of the most popular shopping guides on the web. Offers Buyer's Guides with tips and tools, editors' suggestions, and other features beyond the price comparisons offered by other shopping search sites.
NexTag
http://www.nextag.com
NexTag is a shopping search engine that offers total price comparison (which displays tax and shipping), store ratings, product reviews, and photos.
mySimon
http://www.mysimon.com
One of the original shopping search engines, now owned by CNET. mySimon was the creation of Stanford University student Yeogirl Yun, who later became the founder & chief technical officer of Wisenut, a crawler-based search engine now owned by LookSmart.
PriceGrabber
http://www.pricegrabber.com
PriceGrabber offers user provided merchant and product ratings, product pictures and specifications, and pricing information with "BottomLinePrice" to factor in estimates for applicable sales tax and shipping charges based on the delivery address. Available in English or Spanish, including specialized product searches for retailers in Mexico and Brazil.
PriceScan
http://www.pricescan.com
PriceScan's database consists of publicly available product and pricing information, including data from magazine ads, vendor catalogs, web sites, etc. Unlike most other shopping search engines, information is presented for both online and offline merchants, and PriceScan does not charge merchants for listings.
Shopping.com
http://www.shopping.com
Shopping.com is DealTime, with a clean, sparse interface, with just a shopping search engine and a simple hierarchal directory. If you're a "power shopper" that likes DealTime, you'll appreciate Shopping.com's fast performance and uncluttered results.
Yahoo Shopping
http://shopping.yahoo.com
Yahoo! Shopping connects you with thousands of merchants - traditional retail stores, name-brand catalog companies, small boutiques, and specialty vendors.
