Brilliant Shopper Betas Product Search
With the help of technology veterans from Ask Jeeves, Disney and IBM, comparison shopping has gone vertical. Brilliant Shopper is beta testing a new search engine designed to accumulate as much information as possible about a particular product from countless sources around the Web, combining organic and sponsored results with editorial content and other promotions.
BrillantShopper.com is the latest entrant in an upsurge of vertical search engines that specialize in fulfilling specific needs and filter out undesired Web sites rather than returning unsorted results. In many ways, Brilliant Shopper is an aggregator of content related to shopping from around the Web paired with sponsored advertisements, coupons and other suggestions.
At this time, Brilliant Shopper does not disclose the origin of its sources on its Web site.
A spokesperson told BetaNews that sources are drawn from a combination of index feeds from other crawlers, a proprietary algorithm that spiders the Web and ranks search results for relevance, and partnered comparison shopping sites including Shopping.com. Brilliant Shopper is negotiating with additional comparison shopping Web sites to broaden its results.
Vertical search engines have been in existence for many years in academia where they are used to query electronic resource collections, and are just now becoming more prevalent in the commercial sector.
Some other recent examples of this new breed of commercial search engine are America Online's SingingFish media search engine and the Indeed.com job search engine.
"Our shopping engine provides shoppers with a single location to research, compare and purchase products online," said Phillip Lan, founder and CEO of Brilliant Shopper. "Brilliant Shopper is the first place to go, whether you are doing research or are looking to buy. Our shopping engine drives you through the process from start to finish in a rich and intuitive manner."
The production site is scheduled to go live in the third quarter of 2005. Currently, the site is only optimized for the Internet Explorer Web browser with support for additional browsers forthcoming.