ShopWiki - Next-Generation Shopping Search Engine Review
“ShopWiki is a shopping search engine that indexes retail products from thousands of online merchants. ShopWiki is not a store and does not sell anything. The purpose of the site is to help consumers find the products they are looking for online with ease.”
Buying Guides
Unique content. Shop Wiki adds, like any Wiki, the ability to edit for the community to edit the content. It has some nice buying guides already in place, they say more then 1,000 actually. Many of which have been edited several times already by community members.
Finding a Product
They have an intelligent search engine setup. You can type more complex queries such as price ranges. They have also implemented a sliding bar allowing the user to narrow your price range.
Product Page
- Offers - They generally have a wide variety of merchant offers, but details are often lacking. Also, like Froogle, crawling is not always accurate. For Example, the first two offers for the Western Digital WD740GD 74GB Hard Drive are from stores.tomshardware.com. Well, last I checked TomsHardware didn’t sell anything… In actuality it is a co-brand of PriceGrabber.
- Reviews - Interestingly enough, they have in place some review data from Amazon and Epinions, but do allow users to write their own reviews.
Summary
Pros: Crawling gives them access to more merchants, unbiased. Smarter search capability. eg. ” 5 megapixel digital camera with 10x optical zoom” returns highly qualified results. While some comparison engines like Shopping.com are also fairly smart, many do not have the ability to determine the language.
Cons: Since information is crawled, Shipping and handling and tax is not often found. Also, errors in pricing data or even relevant merchants can occur.
Overall, I’d say the site has high potential to become a quality shopping resource as the unique content grows as well as the community. We will continue to see with these type sites as they mature, if the community will be able to filter out unrelated content. Or if it becomes a linking game.
For more information you can read the NY Times article, or a detailed discussion can be found at ComparisonEngines.com in Brian Smith’s interview with the ShopWiki founders. My favorite comment by a user on Brian’s blog post is “When did Google Adsense and YPN become a legitimate business model?” I wonder how long companies will try to survive on Google Ads.
Thus far ShopWiki has taken the route of PR to gain exposure in the e-commerce market. However, they aren’t the first to take a Wiki approach to online shopping. A competitor lurks, ProductWiki, which is much more Web 2.0ish in my opinion. But that will be another blog post.
Technorati Tags: ShopWiki, shopping comparison, web 2.0, wiki
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