Become.com left beta yesterday, taking an impressive 3.2 billion page index along with it. Registration is no longer required, meaning any shopper can use the site for free. There’s also a spell checker for the less linguistically inclined. Search Engine Journal has more.
Despite its being touted as a shopping search engine, I just typed in a couple of CD and film titles, and didn’t come across a single ecommerce draw. The results were mostly articles and fan reviews.
I’m having a hard time seeing how they position this as a shopping engine. The results listings aren’t even structured like a shopping engine, with multiple fields listing SKU, price, shipping, ePinion ratings, etc. Looks like they’re using a very ordinary search spider that’s not aware of the product feed elements.
What does everyone else think?
Randy Schwartz is Director of Strategic Development at Reprise Media.
Hey, Randy.
My name is Aram Cretan, and I came across your blog yesterday. I actually work for Become.com and, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’d like to tell you and your readers a little bit more about our site.
First of all, thanks for checking out our search engine. We’ve been working our tails off for just about a year now, and we’re proud of the quality of our results. The focus of the results is on shopping *research*, so it’s actually part of our goal to show you the articles and fan reviews you mentioned–assuming they were good ones, of course! Our crawling and ranking system is tuned with shoppers in mind–for an example of what I mean by this, try a search for ‘refrigerator’ on Google and compare it to Become. Since we can assume that someone coming to our site is in ‘shopping mode,’ we can deliver a much more targeted set of results than a general-purpose search engine like Google.
Later this year, we plan to introduce a comparison shopping service of the type you mentioned, with merchant feeds and product listings that can be sorted by price, SKU, etc. For now, though, we believe that the research side of shopping–helping people figure out *what* to buy–is an area in which we can really provide an innovative service.
Thanks for reading; I hope this made our site’s purpose a little more clear.
Aram
Aram,
Thanks for the response. You’ve definitely presented a distinction between the types of functionality a shopping engine can bring, and while I can’t quite see that distinction based on the particular searches I’ve run with Become.com, it sounds like your site will occupy a slightly different niche in the research and sales process, which may give us more control over our client outreach programs.
Quick point of clarification, will the site require full product feeds like the eventual SKU-based shopping directory, or can an advertiser interface with Become.com on a keyword basis as with the Tier 1 and 2 engines?
Thanks again for the response.