Become.com, a new search engine focusing on shopping-related information, launched in beta form yesterday.
The Mountain View, CA, company uses proprietary technology that indexes 2.2 billion Web pages of product reviews, buying guides and articles, and provides a more “targeted” search for shoppers.
Become.com's Affinity Index Ranking technology produces more relevant results than other search engines, the company said, because it delivers comparison information beyond price, including reviews, buying advice and articles.
“Become.com helps consumers by delivering more targeted information quickly and easily for millions of different products,” Become.com founder/CEO Michael Yang said.
Yang formed the company with Yeogirl Yun. They were pioneers of comparison-shopping site mySimon.com.
The targeted information is important, according to Become.com, because a recent Jupiter Research study showed that users of general search engines were dissatisfied with too many results and irrelevant searches.
“The key to their success will be relevance and keeping the search spam out of the index,” said Kevin Lee, executive chairman of search engine marketing firm Did-it.com LLC, New York. “Affiliates often generate pages that look like ratings and reviews, but are actually a poor quality result.”
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
