New Retail Search Site Bets on Product Reviews

The founders of comparison-shopping search engine MySimon Wednesday announced the release of Become.com in beta. The new offering hopes to lure online shoppers with a concentrated measure of reviews, ratings, and price comparisons.

Chief Executive Officer Michael Yang and Chief Technology Officer Yeogirl Yun set their new site apart from rivals because it expands searches to include professional research reviews for any product.

“The articles that our site makes available help to create context for surfers and help them make buying decisions,” Yang said.

Become.com's competitors include Google's Froogle, Shopping.com, and MySimon, which Yang and Yeogirl Yun sold to CNET for $700 million in 1998.

Shopping.com offers companion site Epinions.com so users can refer to consumer reviews. “Become is focused on ‘research,’ whereas we believe consumers' purchase decisions are made based on a wide spectrum of information: price, brand, merchant, availability, reviews, etc.,” Lynn Brinton, vice president of corporate communications at Shopping.com, commented. “What distinguishes Shopping.com is that we provide consumers the broadest range of highly structured, well-organized data from which they can define the terms that matter most to them.”

Google's Froogle crawls the Web for its results, and while online retailers get top billing in the listings, Froogle provides secondary links to product reviews provided by BizRate or NexTag. Become.com's search crawler, Yang said, is based on a new technology called "AIR," or Affinity Index Ranking.

"It's a next-generation-hypertext-link-analysis algorithm," Yang said.

Google declined to comment.

Become.com is part of Google's AdSense distribution program. Like other distribution partners, Become.com receives a fee for sending traffic to Google.

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