Check out Smarter.com’s new site (just launched, so expect some glitches this morning) Besides the snazzy new look and feel, look for the following updates:
1) Order of merchants. The first merchant listing on a product page can’t be bought. It’s the lowest price from a Smarter certified store. The next 5 listings are paid results. All remaining listings are algorithmically determined. This is much different than how most shopping comparison engines operate.
2) Crawling. Smarter is doing a limited crawl to supplement listings. YES! With Shopwiki crawling 120,000 stores, the traditional shopping comparison engines must blend structured (data feed driven) and unstructured (crawled) results to effectively compete. One day USA Today will run a story saying Site X has products from 100,000 stores and Site Y has products from 10,000 stores. Which site do you think the average Joe will trust?
3) Clustering. Check out attribute clustering for apparel. No longer are you limited to store, price, and brand, but Smarter’s engine looks into the title, description and other fields for more detailed information. On a search for jeans, additional clustering might be for wash, color, and style. This isn’t ground-breaking news in the shopping comparison engine world, but it’s a big step forward for Smarter.com.
More in the morning…
Despite the aweful picture of an oversized Buzz Lightyear type figure, Smarter has just gotten a bit dumber IMO.
If you’re interested I blogged about it this a.m. here: http://metacontents.com/2006/07/05/smart-and-smarter-or-dumb-and-dumber/
Keep up the great work, I enjoy your blog.
Jonathan Nelson
I was recently contacted by a Smarter.com rep to join and add our paid listings. I checked it out and we already had products being listed. The rep said that these results were being temporarily backfilled (applicable to certain categories) with Shopzilla data.