In this article, I'll focus on five excellent shopping search engines that cover all types of products, but from different points of view. ShopFind, BuyDirectory, and Buyer's Index are pure search engines - you have to visit the sites they point to in order to buy anything. Shopping.com and Value America are information-rich online stores with powerful search systems.
ShopFind - POINTS YOU TO THE PRODUCT YOU'RE SEARCHING FOR
ShopFind's strength is its ability to find specific products at the web sites it indexes. Its goal is to index every site that's selling something on the Web - whether store, manufacturer, catalog, etc. Although ShopFind falls short of this goal (partly because it's less than a year old), the results that I got were fairly comprehensive.
Originally created by Viaweb, Shopfind is now copyrighted by Yahoo, and is the basis of Yahoo's shopping feature.
Search System - ShopFind's search page is beautifully simple. It includes only a search box and drop-down menu with categories ranging from clothing to electronics.
Just enter the product that you're looking for and choose a suitable category (or choose all). You can use the plus and minus signs to require or exclude words, and quotation marks to designate a phrase.
Results Format - Results include the name of the product, a brief description, price, name of the company and the number of product descriptions matching your keywords at the company's site. Most of the results seem to come from the larger retailing sites.
ShopFind's design is clear, navigation is easy and fast, and it's a pleasure to use.
BuyDirectory - EXCELLENT FOR FINDING SMALLER, SPECIALIZED RETAILERS
BuyDirectory has been around since 1995 (a senior citizen in web terms), and indexes close to 2,000 shopping sites. These sites are a fascinating mixture of specialized boutiques, large retailers like Walmart, and online catalogs - large and small.
Search System - You can search for the product you're interested in by browsing a wide variety of categories or by doing a keyword search.
When searching by keyword, keep the terms you use as nonspecific as possible. For example, instead of entering blouses, enter clothing. This is because your keywords are matched only to the words in the merchants' descriptions of their stores.
