2.2. Shopping Search Engines & Price Comparison Sites

While everybody is concentrated on the general state of the search market, as far as the traditional search engines are concerned, there is a whole new family of search engines out there that almost nobody pays attention to. These new search engines focus uniquely on customers and their buying habits or buying experience.

Comparison shopping search engines can be looked at as online shopping malls, except they have a very important feature that traditional "brick and mortar" don't usually have: search functionality. This is what makes them truly unique.

It was only a question of time for these search properties to appear. After all, statistics today prove that people are using the Internet more and more to find what they are looking for, or to help them find a great deal on what they've been wanting to buy.

What makes comparison shopping search engines useful is that you can compare specific products in the same category, and by many purchasing factors. Price is certainly a very important one. Being able to find shopping information in one convenient location, while having access to consumer buying reviews and reports that will enable you to make a better buying decision can very appealing to a lot of people.

Importance of Shopping Search Engines in E-commerce

Search was a killer application for e-commerce in 2003. Whether businesses optimized Web pages for the best possible results, implemented a paid-search strategy on the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, or joined a shopping search portal such as Shopping.com or Pricegrabber, search proved to be a sure-fire method for getting customers to e-commerce sites.

In August 2001 alone, more than 21 million online consumers flocked to shopping comparison sites to research products, prices, and merchants, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. And that number is expected to increase drastically during every holiday shopping season.

The search engines that offer shopping search options include Ask Jeeves, Google, Lycos, Dogpile, Metacrawler and Yahoo!. But it was enrolling in shopping portals that was at the top of many small business owners' to-do lists.

The three biggest shopping comparison sites all made major renovations in order to attract the millions of consumers who now flock to these sites in search or the best online deals.

Shopping.com, which boasts the largest number of unique visitors of all shopping comparison sites, acquired consumer product review site Epinions in April 2003, creating the fifth largest shopping site in the U.S. at the time, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

The second most popular shopping portal, BizRate, rolled out its upgraded search engine last month. Compared to other shopping search engines, BizRate's scope is huge: It includes more than 26 million products from 38,000 stores.

In 2004, NexTag primarily focused on consumer electronics and tech-related products and also the company expanded its focus to include all consumer goods. NexTag also introduced the concept of 'true price' in 2003 -- the site calculates the total price of an item by using a zip code to compute tax and shipping charges, in addition to the product price.