It started with a quest to buy a British telephone booth. You’ve seen them before—tall, familiar and very, very red. But where to get one?
Doubting that a local retail store would carry such an item, Dwight and Eliot went online, as millions of Internet users do daily, and used a shopping search engine to find the phone booth. It was then that they discovered the world of shopping search to be woefully inadequate.
Rather than throw up their hands in frustration, the duo took to their computers and began to build what we now know of as ShopWiki, the only shopping search engine featuring unbiased, comprehensive search results, wiki buying and gift guides and video product reviews.
And the phone booth? Thanks to ShopWiki, they found one. It now stands in the corner of the office, an enduring symbol of their hard work.
Here’s what Dwight and Eliot have to say about ShopWiki…
What makes ShopWiki the ideal shopping search engine?
Eliot: “Using ShopWiki, any product can show up as a search result, regardless of how big or small the seller is or how much money they’re willing to pay. Unlike most other shopping search engines, we don’t take payment to list products on our site and our search results are sorted by relevance to the consumer.”
What is ShopWiki’s Web-crawling technology?
Eliot: “It’s basically a piece of software that automatically scans the Internet to look for stores. When it finds a store, it tries to figure out everything that store sells. It’s a challenging problem. Not only does the software have to find every Web site on the Internet, but it then has to determine which ones are stores. Once a store is found, our crawler needs to figure out which items are for sale in that store and get the detail information correct, such as the price and product image.
What does a wiki have to do with shopping?
Dwight: “If you’re researching something you want to buy, you’re generally more interested in a product category, not a specific product. For example, you’re probably not going to pick out the exact make and model of an air conditioner without finding out what important features you should consider. You’re in a situation where you need lots of useful information and it’s helpful to have all that information collected in one central place. That’s where the wikis come in.
Wikis are a very good tool for creating product guides. Everyone can contribute knowledge to the wiki buying guides they know most about and the same community moderates the content for accuracy and relevance. Wiki buying guides are much more dynamic and less one-sided than specific product reviews posted by an individual and speak to an entire category of products, such as all air conditioners, rather than one individual model. Once our wiki buying guides and gift guides help you figure out what you need, our search technology will go out and find that product for you."
Why create another shopping search engine when there are already so many on the Web?
Dwight: “The catalyst for creating ShopWiki was a general dissatisfaction with the way people were forced to shop online. We found all of the existing shopping search engines to be lacking for several reasons, mainly because they are biased. In other words, stores have to pay to show up, and the more they pay, the higher they appear in search results. So when I look at search results for a specific product, the first store on the list is one I’ve never heard of and doesn’t have the best price. The results are not based on any sort of relevancy to me. Some retailers are missing from the list because they didn’t pay at all.
We also found shopping search engines to be missing products. They weren’t comprehensive. Depending on what you’re looking to buy, that could be a big problem. If you’re searching for a popular product that is sold in 200 stores on the Web, you don’t notice a problem when only 100 results show up. But if you’re looking for something a little more niche, a comprehensive search can be the difference between results from five stores who sell the product and no results at all. Our goal is to solve this problem by providing a comprehensive list of everything sold on the Internet.”
