My point about comprehensiveness is this – for goods you will want to comparison shop on – vendors comfortable with the CPC model are more than likely going to be high quality vendors. The idea that out there somewhere is a retailer you have NEVER heard of who is increasingly unlikely.

http://www.vault.com/jobs-company/Shopping.com.html
Founded by two Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs in December 1997, Shopping.com, formerly DealTime.com, went live with its online shopping comparison service in June 1999, backed by venture capital funding from firms like Israel Seed Partners and Odeon Capital Partners, as well as by strategic and financial partners including AOL, Time Warner and Bank of America. The site uses an automated shopping “bot” to comb hundreds of web sites — including online merchants, auctions, classifieds and group buying sites — to find the lowest prices on thousands of items.

As you can see the shopping bot was an integral part of the company.

In 2001 alone they spent something 70 million in marketing. I assume you currently work at shopping.com or at least you imply it. Remember Shopping.com started as Dealtime. Their third round of funding in 2000 was $50 Million. This implies of course two previous smaller rounds of funding.

Their second round of funding was $20 Million in 1999.

Second Round
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CGN/is_3748/ai_55770999

Third Round
http://news.com.com/Short+Take+DealTime+raise+50+million/2110-1017_3-236968.html

So just by trolling two of their rounds totaling $70 million. I am still looking for their initial round and I know they had a fourth round.

I like shopping.com I have been a partner with them for a while now. When I find the other rounds I will post them.

1. That company never had as its core business practice crawling websites. It would crawl stores that had no feeds, but it never encouraged it.

2. It never raised $135 million. That I can assure you.

First of all, its simply impossible that there are 500,000 retail stores that offer prices in US $s on the internet. The upper bound is something 50 stores.

Second of all, their “grid” is the anti-definition of consumer friendly. Part of the reason to conduct a comprehensive search is to understand pricing / vendor trade-offs in a logical fashion. Their grid doesnt sort by price, and somehow incorporates no-name merchants such as “smalldog” in its top set of results (even though they are relatively expensive). Its totally unclear how the information is ordered / presented.

Finally (and only because Im not interested enough to debunk the rest of this junk coverage) – because I could rant and rave all day long about how searching by things like color is the most rediculous “feature” ever:

“So take a look…the problems you find will be addressed.”

Ha, yeah right. Extraction at scale and automated normalization are two of the hardest problems being addressed on the internet. They wont just be addressed – it doesnt work that way in real life.

A new comparison shopping site TheFind.com launched today as an all-encompassing shopping search site. The Company has garnered a bit of buzz, with an interesting write-up at GigaOm and Comparison Engines. Although I like the principle, it’s r…