I sat down with Michael Yang and Jon Glick from Become.com a day after the company announced it had raised its second round of financing. Michael and Jon were very open with their plans and even gave me a sneak peek at the company’s soon to launch price comparison engine.

Background
Like many start-ups, Become.com sprouted from Michael Yang’s personal experience while surfing the web. “I was shopping for a LCD projector” Yang explained, “and I wanted to get the best brand possible. I first contacted a friend of mine in IT, but he said it had been a while since he had bought a projector. I then went to Google, but the results seemed very biased because all these merchants were showing up. General search engines leave a lot to be desired as they are not good at providing relevant information to help you buy. Furthermore, shopping comparison engines are only helpful if you know exactly what you’re looking for.”

Yang saw a need for a crawler based engine focused on shopping. “Search is the answer because it’s fundamentally how information is stored and distributed.” So Yang called his longtime friend and partner Yeogirl Yun (the two started MySimon in 1998), who was studying for the Bar exam in Korea, and challenged him to think through some new ideas to find more targeted, relevant results for shopping. Yang personally invested $2m in the new venture and received another $2.5m from VCs and angel investors.

The Company
Michael explained “The mission of Become.com is to help people make ideal buying decisions. ‘Ideal’ means the best product that meets your needs; and we recognize that everyone’s needs might be different as we all have different constraints. The goal, though, is to get people to the buying decision. It’s a specific and precise goal, but broad enough to leave room for innovation. And at the end of 2004, we decided that to really innovate, we needed to build our own engine.”

Jon added “We have an index of 3.2b pages of US shopping content which includes targeted and relevant product and shopping information. We want to help people make decisions on how to best use their money for a wide variety of products and services. Figuring out which camera to buy is no different than figuring out which college to attend. People want information to figure out how to spend money. We want to make that information accessible.”

In his initial search for the LCD projector, Michael went to Productopia and Consumersearch and found some good information, but he wondered why Google didn’t find those sites and instead listed mostly merchants for product searches. He explained “It’s because the search results on Google are manipulated.” [Michael is referring to the fact that wonderful SEOs like myself can optimize a site (through the code, content, etc.) so that it rises to the top of Google’s search results.]

He then went to MySimon but realized the site didn’t help consumers find the right product. I brought up Consumer Reports and Jon responded “Consumer Reports is not very comprehensive in terms of what’s available. Consumer Reports only has 3-5% of all products on the market. They can’t possibly do a review of everything that’s for sale. Everything that you think of buying will be on Become. That’s the idea behind the crawler based engine. By searching the web, we can find everything so a shopper doesn’t have to know the perfect site for LCD projectors, treadmills, etc.”

In another example of Become’s advantage, Michael explained that he was looking to buy a high end digital camcorder as a present and wanted to find out about the Sony HDR-FX1 which was not yet released in the US, but already available in Japan. Through Become, he found a blogger in Japan who had gone to use the camera. The blog entry enabled him to make a more informed buying decision.

Michael went on to discuss the now well documented ‘refrigerator’ search on Google. Sean O’Rourke from Organized Shopping has covered this in depth, so I won’t go into the details, but the basic gist is that if you search for ‘refrigerator’ on Google, you’re going to see some odd results, and if you’re considering buying a refrigerator, the results are almost meaningless.

I brought up the fact that I think the key to search engines is figuring out what question the user is asking. Michael responded “Become understands the intent of the user because they are figuring out what to buy or how to buy. People type generic words into search engines. Less than 5% type in ‘buying guide’. With Become, users don’t have to be search engine experts; they just type in what they are looking for.”

Jon added “Our goal is not generation of editorial content, but giving people access to the best editorial content. Consumer Reports will probably never cover the latest aerodynamic bike helmet. We will. We will point to useful resources. Consumer Reports is just realizing that they have to get listed on the search engines, but this has not and should not be their focus. Search engine optimization is not their core business.” Jon then raised an interesting question: “Is it the responsibility of Google to find Consumer Reports or the responsibility of Consumer Reports to find ways to get on Google?”

On Technology
Michael explained “Our ranking technology is based on something completely new called the Affinity Index Ranking (AIR), which produces much higher relevance in the results and is much harder to spam. The last big leap in search technology was Google’s PageRank, (http://www.google.com/technology/) but PageRank only looks at links, not the context of those links.” Jon gave the following example: “Think of a golf site. Getting inbound links from other golf related sites enhances the rating for that golf site because those links are on topic [contextually connected]. Links to that golf site from casino sites, though, are off-topic and count as detractions. This effectively kills the spam networks.” From Become’s private presentation material “In-Links from sites that match the user’s search topic become more important. Out links to off-topic sites will detract from ranking. Out-links to spam will heavily detract from ranking.”

The problem with the current way to shop online:
Jon said “the funnel that everyone talks about [Yahoo talks a lot about the buying cycle in which users become informed, then shop, then purchase] is not necessarily how it works. Consumers have to go forward and backwards. The current experience is disjointed as there’s no easy way to move through the cycle.” The way Become is integrating its soon to be launched price comparison engine is a way to solve this problem.

On Price Comparison
I then got a sneak peek at the soon to be launched price comparison aspect of Become. Next to the research button, there will be a second button called ‘Shop’ which will include pictures from merchants. In the digital camera price comparison example Michael and Jon showed me, there were selection boxes to allow the user to narrow down choices by brand, price, resolution, etc. A user can select multiple attributes to search on as opposed to having to drill down over and over. At Shopping.com, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, etc., you have to select one attribute at a time. It quickly became clear why the company didn’t decide to partner with one of the current price comparison engines. “We wanted the ability to innovate on the product side and user experience side,” Jon said. This is an exciting innovation which should force the other price comparison engines to sit up and take notice. It just makes searching so much simpler and faster.

When asked about users giving reviews on stores, Jon said, “we plan to incorporate user reviews, but sites like epinions.com will also show up here. The problem with user reviews is that people have an incentive to game the system. We are employing technology to improve the results. Users are encouraged to give their feedback, and we have a team that will incorporate that feedback.” Michael added “We believe that human input is good at every level. Become has a staff of internet researchers and there’s a system that’s very scalable that can be fed into the user algorithm. As people provide feedback, our research team will evaluate the site and inform the algorithm.”

More Price Comparison Details…:
“We will take feeds from merchants, and we already have 200 merchants signed up. We haven’t figured out the refreshing cycle yet. There will be a bidding component, but how the merchant is reviewed will also be a factor. We want to give merchants much more flexibility in terms of their feed. Our merchant center will take a look at the feed in terms of mapped categories, import rate, errors, and will have highly enhanced reporting. Merchants will also be able to manage different feeds from the same account.”